


Nightmare Machine

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Criminal Minds, Inception (2010)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aftermath of Torture, Crossover, Dreams, Gen, Guns, Psychological Drama, case!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-16
Updated: 2011-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 14:58:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/540704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the BAU learns than someone is using a PASIV as a weapon, they are forced to look for unconventional methods to interrogate the comatose victims of the crime. Dominic Cobb is asked to bring his team of extractors to teach the profilers the ins and outs of their trade, for when a mind is the scene of the crime, both extractors and profilers will have to depend on each other to find and stop the criminal responsible…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [bellonablack](http://bellonablack.livejournal.com) and [brighteyed-jill](http://brighteyed-jill.livejournal.com) for betaing!
> 
> [Awesome art by](http://sucksucksmile.livejournal.com/157185.html#cutid1) [sucksucksmile](http://sucksucksmile.livejournal.com).

The only warning Ashley had was the creak on her top step. She bolted upright, heart pounding, terror gripping her for an agonizing moment as the creak was followed by a footstep. It broke her paralysis, and she scrambled at her bedside drawer for her gun. Bullets rolled in the bottom of the drawer as she pulled it open, but the gun wasn’t there.

The gun _was not there_.

Ashley flung herself out of bed to grab her purse and rummage through it; she knew her way around her bedroom despite the dark. The canister of mace, the tazer, the alarm button, they should be-. Only her wallet met her hands. They were not there either.

The floor creaked again outside her bedroom door. She wouldn’t scream. There was no point in screaming; it would just tell the intruder she was afraid. She couldn’t show she was afraid. Ashley backed up and slipped her hand under her mattress. Somehow, someone had managed to move her weapons, but anyone that knew her might know she kept herself armed. No one knew about the blade she’d concealed under her mattress, her last-ditch defense. She found the hilt and drew it out…

Only the hilt came. The blade had been snapped off. Ashley stared at it, her gut a ball of ice, as the door slowly swung open, despite the triple locks.

A silhouette darkened the doorway, barely visible, but somehow she can still see his cruel smile, like a psychotic Cheshire Cat.

She froze for a long moment, and then turned to run, with the man’s laughter ringing in her ears.

\--

Lying asleep on her bed, a needle in her vein, tears slipped from Ashley’s eyes. Beside her, a small machine in a silver briefcase hummed and sighed softly. A second line led to a man reclining in her easy chair, a cruel smile on his face.

\-----

“We’ve had three victims over the past three months.” J.J. nodded at each picture in turn as they appeared on the screen. “Three months ago, Jessica Rand, 32, marketing director for a major drug company from Aspen, Colorado. Two months ago, Kaitlin Braymer, 38, vice president of a banking corporation from Los Angeles, and yesterday Ashley Sorensen, 33, recently-promoted partner at a law firm in New York.”

“The unsub definitely has a type,” Morgan said. “Professional women in prominent positions, attractive, similar age-range, all high-risk targets. How did they die?”

“They didn’t,” J.J. said, ignoring the questions and protests as she put up crime scene photos. Each showed the women on their beds, a needle in their hands leading to a device in a silver suitcase. “Each victim was found hooked up to an intravenous drug dispersal unit, specifically a Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous device.”

“A dream machine?” Garcia asked, eyes wide.

J.J. nodded, a tight look around her lips meaning there was worse news to come. “Dream therapists were brought in to attempt to wake the victims, but each was thrown out of the victims’ dreams several times and couldn’t make any progress. Eventually the Somnacin solution used to keep the victim under was exhausted, but each victim remained in a comatose state. Repeated efforts to wake them have failed. The only information the dream therapists have been able to retrieve was-.” J.J. paused and looked down at her notes to read the quote accurately. “‘Whoever was in here before us was a monster.’ More specifically, there is severe damage to the victims’ minds which makes it impossible for conventional dream therapy to work. The doctors aren’t holding out much hope for drug therapy or neurosurgery either.”

The profilers sat up straighter at that bleak and disturbing statement.

“And there’s no chance this was an accident?” Prentiss asked. “I’ll grant you that directed dreaming and dream sharing isn’t widespread, but some people have been known to use them recreationally.”

“According to their friends and family, no. None of the victims was ever known to use a PASIV device on their own.”

“That doesn’t exactly mean anything,” Morgan said. “It’s not exactly common, and people usually don’t exactly parade that they’re using one.

“None of the victims had traces of long-term Somnacin use, or any history of sleep problems,” J.J. said. “I had the local PD units check. They were all far more likely to be a victim of extraction, considering their jobs. Each of them had access to sensitive materials for their respective companies.”

Rossi shook his head. “Extraction was after my time; I’m mostly working off of popular rumor,” he said, looking over at the other for a quick explanation.

“The military original developed the shared dream state as a way to practice combat techniques while minimizing injury, but the possibilities for information extraction turned dream sharing into a corporate espionage device,” Reid explained quickly.

“So, could this be an extraction gone wrong?” Rossi asked.

“Possibly, but considering the fact that three victims haven’t woken up, and the identical comments from the dream therapists in each of the cases, it seems this unsub knows exactly what he’s doing,” Hotchner said.

“Are we certain it’s a man?” Prentiss asked, folding her hands. “Dreams are an equalizer.”

Hotchner realized she was playing devil’s advocate, making sure everyone was on their mental toes, and nodded in gratitude. “Statistically it’s more likely to be a male. Extraction was developed in the military, and those with the most experience are most likely to have military experience. Also the accounts from the dream therapists about the minds of the victims indicates sadistic behavior towards women.”

“There wasn’t any sign of forced entry?” Morgan asked, moving on to the next set of questions.

“All three women had excellent personal security, and there was no sign up a breach at their homes until family or co-workers came to check on them,” J.J. confirmed.

“But take a look at their personal security,” Reid said. “Assuming he was able to disable their guards, alarms, and locks quietly, he still managed to gain entry to their bedrooms without waking them and get them hooked up while they were sleeping.”

“Could we be looking at an inside job? Did the victims let him in?” Rossi asked.

“It’s possible, but unlikely,” Hotchner said. “All three victims were known to be fanatical about personal security, and all evidence points to them being put under very late at night, well after their homes were usually locked up for the night.”

“What exactly was this unsub trying to do? There’s no sign of trauma on the bodies, no sign of sexual assault…” Prentiss skimmed through the files quickly and turned to Garcia. “Penelope, was there any evidence of theft in any of their bank accounts, storage areas, stocks or bonds, anything?”

Garcia typed her inquires, and eventually shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary on any of their accounts, and the victims’ family and friends didn’t say anything about stuff being missing.”

“We know this guy has to be controlled, skilled, and he’s obviously choosing these women specifically. He knows their routines,” Morgan said, tapping one of the pictures of the neat and tidy crime scenes.

“And he has to have some source of income. He’s leaving the PASIV devices at each crime scene, and those cannot be inexpensive. They’re his calling card,” Rossi said.

“But we don’t know what, exactly, he’d doing to the victims while they’re in a dream state. Is this about control, power, revenge, or some kind of display?” Prentiss asked. “He’s hurting them, and that’s all we know.”

“We’re going to need expert help. We need to look at this from two angles,” Hotchner said. “One is from the outside, working victimology, studying the unsub’s technique for gaining entry, looking at the geographical profile, everything we usually do.” He stood up and pushed away from the table.

“And the second?” Rossi asked.

“We have three witnesses we need to figure out how to question.”

\-----

Erin Strauss did not even raise an eyebrow at Hotchner’s request. 

“I expected you to ask. I have someone in mind,” she said calmly.

Hotchner had come in expecting a fight. He’d carefully laid out his arguments, prepared counters for all the objections she was likely to raise. Despite the real threat of extraction, dream sharing was still very controversial amongst all the government branches. But, despite that controversy, it was far more likely that certain individuals would know the names of professional extractors; people they might one day have to use. It was more than likely that there were some already in the government, employed legally, if discretely. 

Hotchner needed one of them to teach his team how to extract. What a dream therapist might not be able to handle, his team probably could. He’d expected Strauss to tell him to go back and figure out this case on his own. But this was the best way. It was so rare for his team to be called in for cases where the victims could speak for themselves, where they’d seen their attacker and could identify him. This could be a major breakthrough, a way to stop this man before another victim dropped. 

Also, Hotchner had been attempting to get his team this kind of training for years. Profiling was always evolving. While dream extraction would only be useful in certain conditions, it was another potential potent tool in their arsenal, and Hotchner wanted to know how it was done. 

And Strauss had said yes. She had _anticipated_ his question. He hadn’t been aware that she had even read the files on this case, let alone was truly ready to help his team.

“His name is Dominic Cobb,” Strauss said, handing him a slim file and blithely ignoring his bemusement. “He was in on some of the ground-floor testing of the limits of dream sharing, and is an expert on extraction. He was considered the best extractor in the black market for several years. He returned to America three years ago, was cleared of certain charges against him, pardoned for his black market activities, and has been working with some government officials to lend his expertise to situations of this nature.”

Hotchner flipped through the file quickly. A few things caught his eye, but he was paying far more attention to Strauss’ words. It wasn’t the thought of an ex-criminal helping out the FBI that bothered him. Penelope Garcia could be considered to be in that same category and she was far from the only one. But the fact that Strauss would let him have access to an asset that was apparently helping out people in high places puzzled him. Hotchner knew Strauss considered him to be political Kryptonite, and lending Cobb to him could erode her own power.

“Ma’am, why Cobb? There are other legal practitioners of extraction without that kind of background. Any one of them could have trained us.” The question was less for his curiosity about Dominic Cobb than it was about Strauss’ answer.

Strauss became very still, though her eyes gleamed. “He’s the best,” she said tightly. “Your team needs the best.”

Hotchner didn’t let anything show, but he felt the shock as an almost palpable force. She _knew_ Cobb. She’d interacted with him before. If she had known anything of what the victims were feeling, of being trapped in their nightmares and unable to wake up, that would explain her sudden push to get Hotchner’s team involved in the case.

\-----

It seemed so innocuous. A silver briefcase, inside containing a relatively simple apparatus to distribute a drug in a controlled, timed manner. It did not look like a nightmare machine. And Dominic Cobb, stylishly dressed in a conservative suit, sandy hair and tanned skin from a California lifestyle, did not seem like someone who could master it.

That was the point. He’d been a high-class con artist for years, working in a very subtle medium. Seeming to be other than you were was an asset. If it hadn’t been for the shrewd intelligence in his eyes, it would have been easy to not give him a second thought.

“You have the specs for this?” Rossi asked, gesturing at the PASIV. Strauss had been as good as her word; Cobb had shown up the next morning, fresh from Santa Barbara. Hotchner had elected to try a simple round of questioning first, with just him and Rossi talking to Cobb, learning about extraction process as they went. Garcia had given everyone a hand-out of the general knowledge of dream-sharing, but what Cobb could tell them was what they truly needed to know. The fact that they needed him for a case would not come up until they had gotten his measure.

There was also the strong possibility that someone skilled enough to use a PASIV as a weapon to force people to go comatose was someone that Cobb knew. Better for him to realize the magnitude of the crime first before he felt compelled to defend anyone.

“Yes. Probably three quarters of the extractor community has blueprints, and the rest could do simple repairs. I know three people who could build one without the plans. They’re not that hard to put together; that’s the reason why the military lost control of PASIV technology in the first place.” Dominic Cobb was remarkably calm for a man sitting in the middle of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, describing his expertise in a virtually untraceable, insidious method of crime. 

Then again, he’d been invited here, secure in his pardon. Aside from the suspicious circumstances surrounding his wife’s death, Cobb could at best be described as a white collar criminal. Extraction itself generally caused no harm, physically or mentally. The harm only came later, in the waking world, when people fought over the secrets extracted, or, if the job failed, not extracted.

“So what do you need to know to build a PASIV?” Hotchner asked. 

“Someone with access to a reasonable array of tools, along with some background in electronics and engineering. That’s if you’re building from the ground up. Some of the components are available for other purposes. The central dispersal unit can be used for drug treatments at hospitals, for example, and they’re not that hard to obtain. In that case all you’d need are the blueprints for the machine.”

That description fit the profile. The unsub was probably a sadist, but he was also organized, controlled, educated, and intelligent.

“You could also steal a unit. There are enough around, and not everyone secures them as well as they should,” Cobb added. 

“And the drug used?” Rossi prompted. 

“Somnacin? That’s a bit trickier. You need a real laboratory to make it, and a knowledgeable chemist.”

“So you usually buy the compound?”

“Usually. Some gets stolen along with the PASIV, but most professionals buy what they need. It depends on the job, how deep you want to go. The basic compound will let you dream together. With some modifications you can get different effects, like sharper perception or deeper levels…” Cobb trailed off, his eyes flickering over the file folders on the table. 

\--

Cobb kept his composure as the profilers asked him questions that could have been answered by any competent dream therapist. Their own casualness was as much of a façade as his, and it was likely that, under those professional expressions, that they were just as nervous as he was. He’d been in the offices of more than one government bigwig since he’d returned to America, but always as a teacher, always in a slight position of power over the senator or general who needed to be taught how to defend himself. He remembered how it used to be, when the person hiring him could turn on him in an instant, and he’d have little recourse but to run. The profilers were trying to rattle his cage a little, just to see what might ooze out. 

Cobb’s stomach clenched, and he made certain not to fidget.

Hotchner paused, his expression going very still. “Describe pain in the dream world.”

Cobb felt himself pale. If they were asking about that… “If you die in a dream, you wake up. But if you’re hurt, you feel the pain. Pain is in the mind.”

“It seems very real.” 

“Yes. Very.” Too real, too painful, and you could experience anything, literally any kind of pain in a dream.

“Do you remember the pain afterward?”

“If you’re on the extraction team? You remember. It’s not quite as sharp as something real, but you remember. The subject usually passes it off as a dream, and they forget.” Thank God they did, or extractors would never be able to get any work done.

“Usually,” Rossi repeated.

Cobb looked at the folders again, a sick feeling starting to roil his gut. 

“Are there compounds that will help a dreamer remember, or make it seem more real?”

“You don’t want the subject to remember. They think it’s real while they’re in the dream, but you don’t want them to remember your face after the extraction.” Then they would chase you to the very ends of the earth for invading their mind. Cobb had learned the value of anonymity in that profession early and well. Those that hadn’t-- who liked leaving calling cards in someone’s head-- they usually didn’t last very long.

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

Cobb was silent long enough that his answer was a foregone conclusion, and the profilers knew it. “I’ve heard of things like that, yes.”

Hotchner flipped open a folder. “We’re currently looking for an extractor. Three months ago, Jessica Rand didn’t show up for work. When friends investigated, they found her asleep in her home, hooked up to a PASIV. Two months ago, Kaitlin Braymer. Yesterday, Ashley Sorensen. None of the victims were able to be awakened. All the evidence points to an unknown male entering the home and putting the women under while they were sleeping. The male stayed hooked up for an indeterminate period of time, then left the women plugged in.”

Cobb felt decidedly sick. “Have the women been unhooked?”

“All three remained plugged while attempts were made to wake them, both medically and with dream therapy. All attempts failed, and then the Somnacin compound ran out. All three victims remain comatose, and their vital signs have begun a slow decline.”

“They were lost,” Cobb said softly, without thinking. “He took them somewhere in there and got them lost. Without a way back, if they were deep enough…” He closed his eyes for just a second, seeing Saito, withered and ancient, looking at him with confusion.

“There were no signs of physical abuse.” Hotchner paused, searching for something in Cobb’s expression. “But all of the victims had been crying.”

 _Shit_. Cobb knew a trump card when he heard it, an unspoken question of whether or not they were going to have to ask him for help. He straightened in his seat and leaned forward, all casualness gone. “What do you want? How can I help?”

“I understand that you were considered to be the best extractor. I need you to teach my team how to extract. Because this man will not stop, and he hasn’t left anything behind to identify him without help. Different cities, different states, and nothing to connect his victims except for the MO of his crimes. We’ve done all we could with conventional methods. Our best way of catching him and possibly saving any other future victims is to attempt to communicate with Jessica, Kaitlin, and Ashley. He is not going to stop until we catch him.”

“You want to go in and…” Cobb shook his head. “Do you realize how dangerous that is? You have no idea where he put them, or what you’ll see.”

“Mr. Cobb, my team is used to putting themselves in the place of killers or victims on a daily basis.”

“Not like this. You can’t just close the folder on this once you’re done.”

“You’d be surprised as what we can handle.”

Cobb looked away, staring at a spot on the wall and wondered if they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. If they knew what they were getting him into.

“Despite what you might think, no one on my team is taking this lightly. If there were a doctor or therapist who could help these women, we would have asked. But two trained medical extractors have already tried, and they couldn’t find anything. They were thrown out of the women’s minds within a few minutes, and neither of them was inexperienced. They both refused to try again after multiple failures. It wasn’t the type of dream; it was the state of the minds themselves. This unsub was extremely brutal in a place where he’d leave little outward sign or evidence. This is what we’re trained for. You have the extraction knowledge we need, and we have the experience with mental trauma and finding clues left behind.”

“How many people are on your team?”

“Five profilers, one media liaison, and our technical analyst. Six would need training.”

Cobb regarded Hotchner levelly. This was not a training job for one person, not if they wanted to be trained as a group, not if they wanted to learn in any kind of reasonable time frame. “What kind of legal pull do you have?”

\--

“I can make recommendations.” Hotchner kept his voice level as possible, feeling a dull triumph. He’d managed to bring Cobb in, to get him engaged, but this was only the first step of a ten thousand step staircase.

“Because if you want six people to be taught in this short of a time frame, you’re going to need more than me. You need a whole team. My team.”

“All of whom have participated in extraction before.” It wasn’t a question. 

Cobb smiled slightly at Hotchner’s deadpan expression despite the seriousness of the situation. “Some have made a career out of it. They won’t come if it means a prison sentence.”

Hotchner nodded tersely as he wrote something down.

“Agent.” Hotchner looked up. “I do want to help. I’m working off a few lifetimes’ worth of bad karma.”

\-----

“Out of the question.”

Hotchner didn’t even twitch at Chief Strauss’ bald refusal of his request. He certainly hadn’t expected this burst of reasonable good relations to last.

“Ma’am, you brought Mr. Cobb in in the first place. He is very willing to help, but we’re going to need more than one individual to train my team.”

“There is no need to train your entire team. All you need is one person-.”

“Ma’am, you’re thinking of therapeutic dreamscaping. This is extraction, and Mr. Cobb has informed me that a safe minimum is three on a team. For the victims we intend to interview, he’d honestly prefer more.”

Strauss’ mouth had a bitter, mulish set to it, and Hotchner kept himself calm in the face of her stubborn unreason. Honestly he had expected a much worse reaction. There was something about this that rang false, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint the source. What he was asking for was a significant risk to her own credibility if anything went wrong. All in all, she hadn’t reacted so badly to the fact that Hotchner needed her to put the wheels in motion for more pardons and immunity for a group of international criminals. 

“How many more?” she asked. 

“Aside from Cobb, he knows a group of four others he has worked with in the past. We’re going to need all the help we can to master this technique in time to stop this unsub. There are only three victims alive that we know of, and every minute that passes brings them closer to death. We need more clues before we can find the person responsible. Otherwise I expect that we’ll have a new victim in our hands in another few weeks. Possibly sooner. He will be accelerating.”

Something flickered in Strauss’ face, and Hotchner fell silent to give her a chance to think. She’d brought Cobb in first. She had to know that the rest of his team would be right behind him for something like this. Something about the case disturbed her on a personal level. Had she or someone she cared for once been the target of an extraction? That would explain both her desire to see the rogue extractor stopped and not to see many other extractors in one place.

“I’ll see to it,” she ground out, with all the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to her own execution.

\----

Strauss unlocked the bottom desk drawer and pulled out a burn phone, pre-paid and anonymous. It wouldn’t stop her agents from discovering her involvement entirely, but it would certainly slow them down, if they ever decided to get suspicious. If she was lucky, they’d have too much to think about to do more than wonder at how she had gotten this done. She dialed.

The phone only rang once. “Saito, it’s Erin,” she said in greeting. “I need the other favor we discussed.” Saito’s smugness could almost be heard from the other end of the line. Strauss hadn’t ever wanted all of Cobb’s extractors in one place, but she’d had the sinking feeling that some day she would need them. She had bargained for their possible presence only on the extreme out chance that she would need to contain a potential disaster. Saito would never let her forget this.

“They will be very reluctant to come. Certainly they will not be willing to set foot in any FBI building, no matter the reassurances.”

“I need them, Saito.”

“Your employees are no fools, and Mr. Cobb is not either.” 

Strauss clenched her jaw in frustration for a moment. Cobb would know what she’d done to get his team here, and her agents would figure it out shortly. Doing this was exposing herself to a very uncomfortable degree. 

“Use whatever language you have to on your end. I can make certain they’ll be kept out of prison. Besides, I should think Mr. Cobb would enjoy employing them on the right side of the law for a change.”

“The right side, Ms. Strauss, not your side. From what you have told me, I expect there is more in common between my team and yours than you’d care to admit. They are only so amenable to manipulation.”

“Maybe so. The fact of the matter is that sooner or later this unsub or a copycat is going to get to someone important, and that will cause new laws to be leveled against PASIV users. Neither of us can afford that.” Saito was silent, and Erin almost regretted her choice of words. Extraction for business or political purposes was illegal, and both had too much dirt on each other’s activities to make threats.

“Do what you must. If you cannot deliver your protection, I will warn the team not to come.”

“I always deliver, Saito.”

The phone disconnected, and Erin locked it back in its drawer. Picking up her office phone, she dialed her contact in the Department of Justice.

\-----

Hotchner hadn’t necessarily been expecting Strauss to help him any further with this case, despite his warning. Not that he’d doubted her passion in their initial meeting to get Cobb, but bringing criminals into the FBI was going to cost her, and Strauss hated losing ground in her endless jockeying for position. Even with the possibility of the BAU being blamed for more deaths, Hotchner hadn’t been certain of her aid.

She must have owed someone a very hefty favor. Or she was trying to cover up sins in her past.

“They’ve been brought in on conditional immunity,” Strauss said briskly, handing him a slim folder. “While certain members of the FBI will be briefed on their backgrounds-.” Hotchner wondered if his team would be included in that briefing. He rather thought not; Erin Strauss was not in the habit of making things too easy for him. “-they would only come if their freedom were preserved.”

“Understandable,” Hotchner said. Understandable, if entirely criminal in thinking. As a lawyer, Hotchner had seen that kind of deal-making countless times. 

“Mr. Cobb trusts them to deal with all of you honestly and train you well. His services to the DoD over the past three years have earned him regard in high places.”

“As you say, ma’am.” Strauss had used up favors from the Department of Defense. She _needed_ this solved like a drowning woman needed air, but would never say so. She’d get Hotchner’s best on this case, which was all he’d ever given.

“They’re arriving tonight, and will be escorted to your briefing room at 2pm,” she concluded briskly.

Hotchner nodded and turned to go.

“Aaron.”

He paused, and thought he saw a shadow cross his section chief’s face.

“They truly are the best, and good improvisers. Don’t scare them off.”

“I’m going to be letting them inside my subconscious; I don’t intend to get off on the wrong foot with them,” he said calmly.

“Good,” she said shortly. “Don’t.”

\-----

“Reid said the positioning of the bodies was very deliberate, very staged. The unsub’s making a statement,” Rossi said, going over everyone’s notes to bring Hotchner up to speed on what they’d done while he was dealing with Strauss.

“Vulnerability?” Hotchner asked for confirmation and Rossi nodded. Each of the victims had been laid on top of their bed covers, fully clothed, but exposed on all sides. The blinds were shut in the entire house, and the doors and windows locked. “They’re for him. He’s the only one who gets to see them in that state until he’s done.”

“The lab has run the DNA samples we’ve gotten against every database we have, and this guy isn’t in the system,” Rossi added, tempering his good news with the bad. That the crime scene techs had even managed to find DNA was a fluke, but apparently the unsub had discarded his IV needle on his way out the door. But unfortunately it gave them nothing but a way to confirm his identity when they caught him.

“Does that strike you as careless?” Hotchner asked.

“Arrogant, maybe. He thought we wouldn’t find it, or if we did, we wouldn’t be able to use it against him. He knows we have nothing.”

Hotchner pressed his lips together as he put down the folder from Strauss’ office.

“She folded,” Rossi said, a hint of disbelief in his voice. “How the hell did you manage to convince her to bring in Cobb’s team?”

“I didn’t,” Hotchner said honestly. “She wants this man found, and she’s willing to sweat blood to get it.”

“Get us professional extractors to get into our victims’ minds.” Rossi shook his head. “Aaron, why this route? This is the most invasive thing we’ve ever done to a victim, and we can’t even obtain their personal permission.”

“Dave, you’ve looked at the reports from the other field offices. With the information we received, would you change anything about their preliminary profiles?”

Rossi hesitated a long moment and sighed. “No. They came to mostly the same conclusions we did at first.”

“In my understanding of how this dream extraction works, this unsub has an unprecedented amount of time to harm these women in literally any way he can imagine. There will be no basement room or mobile torture chamber for us to find, and the only reason he is leaving his machines behind is to impress us with his sophistication and taunt us with what he’s done. This kind of skill in the extraction field is rare.”

Rossi nodded in understanding. “The extractors might know him.”

“And even if they don’t, they will be showing us how extractors operate. They’ll help us build the profile just by being here.”

“What if one of them is the unsub?” Rossi asked. He didn’t think it was likely, but he wanted to hear Hotchner’s reasoning.

“This unsub couldn’t resist trying his technique out on co-workers. I don’t think all of them could be unaware of his proclivities if they’d ever come across him.”

“And you said he’s leaving his machines behind to impress us. That implies someone who wants to be known in his field,” Rossi pointed out.

“So even if they don’t know him, they might know of him,” Hotchner pointed out.

“Pray that they do, and we can end this soon.”

\-----

Arthur set a small, neat stack of files on the table in Cobb’s hotel room before sitting on the edge of one of the chairs, back straight and gaze intense. It was as if to make up for all the hours embraced in a chair sleeping, or flying, or traveling by train, Arthur needed to spend his waking hours on high alert.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Cobb said, eying the folders with a hint of trepidation. Arthur set down his drink as an answer – club soda with lime. Arthur never had alcohol while he was working. 

“I wasn’t even sure you were going to come,” Cobb said. “Thank you.”

“Saito made sure the offer was genuine,” Arthur said. He picked up the soda to sip at it, barely looking ruffled from his ten-hour flight into the States. “And you asked, Dom. You said it was important.”

“It is.” 

“So I came prepared. And so did everyone else.” There was the faintest hint of a smile on Arthur’s face. “Did you really think Eames was going to miss a chance to show up government agents? And Ariadne’s wanted to meet your kids since forever.”

Cobb smiled and shook his head. He had missed everyone more than he could say; this was a hell of a way to get the band back together.

“Do I want to know where you got those files from?” Cobb asked.

“Internet. The agents’ public records only. I’m good, but not that good,” Arthur said, leaning forward to open the first file. “I’d like to know if we’re going to trip over any landmines in there before we start. Thank God these people are usually above board.” Considering the haunted look Cobb had spied on one or more of the profiler’s faces, Arthur was right to be so cautious.

“Ok, let’s break it down. Should we get the others?”

“Eames is getting rid of jet lag in the bar downstairs, Yusef is going over those chemical analyses he was working on, and Ariadne is writing her thesis.”

“So, over breakfast, then.”

Arthur smiled and opened the first folder.

\-----

Rossi wasn’t certain exactly what he’d been expecting. But the extraction team didn’t quite fit his hazy mental pictures. Cobb introduced them all by a single name and title. They all had the ease of old friends.

Arthur, the pointman, was fit and slender. With slick-backed hair and impeccably fitted suit, he could have easily passed for a lawyer or businessman.

Eames, the forger, looked more like a con artist. His clothes were far more casual and comfortable than Arthur’s, and an easy wide smile bedecked his stubbled face as he greeted everyone with slightly sarcastic cheer.

Yusef, the chemist, was dark-haired and intense, very interested in everyone. He kept looking around as if he were devising experiments on the spot.

And Ariadne, the architect, really threw everyone for a loop. Younger than the rest by five years or more, she looked like a graduate student that had been plucked out of a lecture hall. 

But despite their differences in age and experience, there was an ease in the way they talked together, moved together, that spoke of their trust in each other. While Rossi was fairly certain Eames and Arthur were probably old pros at extraction, Ariadne simply couldn’t have been doing this as long as they had. But that might not matter for them. From what Rossi had learned about extraction, this team might have been together for only a few years in real time, but in dream time, might have spent a decade learning about each other. 

In practical terms, they could be as strong of a team as Rossi’s fellow profilers after having only been on a few jobs together. 

\----

Arthur kept his greetings short and to the point while the profilers introduced themselves, more interested in seeing how much his research matched the reality of the people in front of him. Files could tell a lot about someone, but seeing a person in action, even if that action was only a simple meeting, could fill in blanks that just didn’t exist on paper.

He had the feeling that his research only scratched the surface, but it was accurate for the limitations. Even the public files on the profilers-- their available records, high school yearbooks, back issues of local papers --bore out the mannerisms he saw. Hotchner, the former lawyer and current unit chief, was straight as an arrow. He was dedicated to the job to a fault and had lost his wife and almost his life to an attack last year. Over a decade of hunting down human monsters had put hard lines on his face, and made him wary and prepared. Doubly armed with a shoulder and ankle holster, he had a poker face that Arthur frankly envied. He was someone that the others looked up to with genuine respect. Earn his trust, and the rest of his team would follow.

Morgan, the ex-cop, had grown up in a tough town. He had been on the bomb squad, and he was probably the best choice for fighting projections if necessary. Most people Arthur worked with were not trained nearly so well for combat. The experienced Rossi would have a wealth of images to draw on to build dreams, and he had a calm demeanor that meant he was unlikely to let his projections get out of hand. The young genius, Dr. Reid, had some nasty experiences in his background, according to the newspaper articles (several near-death experiences with dangerous criminals, the details, of course, not given), and Arthur was definitely worried about getting into his head. If anyone had an ounce of sense, they’d have him build, rather than be the subject for any training.

Prentiss’ record had been almost non-existent, other than she’d moved around a lot as a child. But Arthur was good at reading between the lines; “undercover work,” her record had said silently. He’d let Eames have the joy of her for training. Anyone used to living many lives could probably forge. The media liaison, J.J., seemed unflappable and more than competent, with an easy smile and girl-next-door looks that were rather disarming. A reluctant subject would be inclined to trust her.

Saito had been right; the profilers had the potential to be a top-notch team, even if they were the kind of people that could hunt Arthur down for his day job. He felt a flutter of uncertainty, and quashed it as he reminded himself that they had called _him_ for help. The ball was in his court.

As Arthur pulled his attention back to the group as a whole, he realized the profilers were evaluating him as much as he was them, searching him and the others for strengths and weaknesses. They wanted to get their measure before the real testing began. He smiled very, very slightly; whatever this job turned out to be, he doubted it would be dull.

\-----

Hotchner was studying everyone’s expressions while J.J. went over the specifics of the case for the benefit of the extractors. Strauss had elected not to inform them why they had been asked to come to the BAU. Yes, they knew the profilers wanted extraction training. But they hadn’t known it was for a case that might involve one of their own.

Ariadne had put a hand to her mouth when she saw the pictures of the prone bodies on their beds, struck down in their own homes. Arthur’s eyes had narrowed when the PASIV device was shown, while Yusef’s eyebrows had shot up in surprise. Eames had been seemingly bored with the whole affair, but his grip on the mug of coffee showed white knuckles. Cobb looked only slightly less green than yesterday, but there was a determined set to his mouth.

“I know we did not mention the full circumstances when we asked you to come, but this case is very sensitive. Of all people, you should understand why. We cannot order you to help us, but we’re asking you to,” Hotchner concluded.

“I’d like a chance to think about it,” Eames said after a long silence, consciously relaxing his hand to take a sip of coffee. His pose was casual, but Hotchner suspected it was more habit than anything else. Show that you were indifferent to a potential client’s job offer, and he might offer you more to do it. After a lifetime operating under those circumstances, the habit would have been hard to shake.

It didn’t help that Hotchner was asking for him and the others to teach people that could one day turn on him and his kind if they stepped out of line.

“We need your answer by tomorrow morning. This unsub is not going to wait, and we’ll need as much time as we can get to learn who he is and how to stop him,” Hotchner said calmly. Ariadne swallowed and looked about ready to speak when Arthur elbowed her subtly. Yusef just nodded, pushing back his chair as Eames stood up to go.

“Hotch-,” Morgan started, but a quick shake of Hotchner’s head silenced him.

“Tomorrow, then,” Eames said. He strolled out of the briefing room, the other extractors filing out behind him. Ariadne was next to last, and Cobb murmured for her to go back to the hotel with the others before turning back to the profilers.

\--

“Your opinion?” Rossi asked.

Cobb sighed and looked away from the profilers’ intense gazes.

“They’ll probably do it. I’ll talk with everyone later.”

“If they don’t?”

“I could probably teach you one at a time, but it will take longer,” Cobb said. “I know that’s the whole reason you pulled God knows how many strings was to bring my people in, but I can’t force them and I know you don’t have anything to compel them.”

Hotchner didn’t crack a smile and Cobb regretted his choice of words. Extraction was such a subtle crime that records of it were scanty and laws against it even less so. That was what made this case so frustrating and why the FBI was willing to risk opening its agents to such a controversial interrogation technique.

“Do you understand what we’re trying to do eventually? We need to get into the victims’ minds and talk to them. The unsub would have left clues in everything he did to them and everything we find in there we can use to find him. He’s left us little evidence but the machines themselves, and while we can use that to narrow down a suspect pool, it’s likely this man has flown under the radar for years, possibly decades. The best evidence we might find is inside the victims’ minds, because in there he thought he wouldn’t have had to worry about hard evidence.”

Cobb nodded slowly, brow furrowed in consternation as he looked up.

“Agent Hotchner, realistically I could teach you the basics of extraction in a few hours. But it takes time to work on control, experience to remember where you are and what you need to do. It’s easy to get distracted, and if this…”

“Unsub. Unknown subject,” Hotchner supplied.

“If this unsub was getting creative in the victims’ minds, there’s going to be a lot of distraction.”

“Mr. Cobb, I’ll be very frank when I say my team and myself have seen or experienced some of the worst things one human being can do to another. I’m not worried about distraction. I’m worried about the newness of the medium. I would like one of your team with my people at all times while they’re trying to extract.” 

“In the dream.”

“Yes. We have three victims still alive and a short period of time before the unsub strikes again.”

Cobb looked uncertain. He was worried, but not about accepting. He was more concerned about what Hotchner would say if he _did_ accept. He wasn’t sure either of them would like what they might see in each other’s minds.

“If my team agrees, we’ll give you our best,” he said.

\-----

“They’re eerie,” Eames said, tossing back his scotch with a faint grimace. I’ve let you lot in my head a few times, but they’re…”

“Invasive,” Arthur said. He hadn’t been the only one to see the profilers watching their reactions during the briefing, subtly spying to see if any of them reacted too much or too little to the victims’ plight. The hawk-like glances had gone away as the profilers had dismissed them as a threat, one by one relaxing slightly as if a terrible danger had passed. Eames had bitched about their stares during the entire cab ride to the hotel. 

“Not invasive, they just… put the pieces together a lot more quickly,” Cobb said, trying to smooth things over.

“They’re mind readers. I don’t want them telling what my choice of wallpaper in my dream means my dog died when I was a boy,” Eames said flatly. 

“Does it?” Ariadne asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No, but you get my drift. I don’t want them in.”

“We can’t just back out,” Ariadne said, leaning forward over the table to make her point. The idea of someone trapped in a dream unable to wake up had hit all of them hard, but the idea particularly frightened Ariadne. The others just covered it a lot better, a career in lying having taught them that showing weakness could be dangerous. 

“No, that’s exactly what we should do. Pardons or no, we’re cutting into our own livelihood by teaching them,” Arthur said.

Cobb could sympathize with Arthur and Eames. Outside of a few specialized psychotherapy fields and military applications, there weren’t that many legitimate uses for PASIV technology. It required too much training and the risks were too great for the entertainment industry, even if people were willing to expose themselves that much. That left illegal spying. If they all hadn’t owed Saito so much for his protection after the Fisher job (a “bonus” beyond price for those in an illegal profession), half the team would have told him exactly where to stick his request. 

“We’re cutting into it if we don’t help. They guy, whoever he is, is using dreams as a weapon,” Cobb said pointedly.

Everyone got the implications in one. Right now extractors were seen as tools of industrial espionage or private detectives for those requiring absolute discretion. The relatively untraceable nature of their crimes meant police didn’t pursue them very aggressively. (Disgruntled clients or subjects were another matter.) But if it became known that extractors could physically hurt or kill someone with dreams, police passivity towards them would vanish, and their jobs would be much, much harder than before.

“You know where this kind of crime could lead,” Yusef said ominously. “I would not care to become a true back-alley dealer. I just finished arranging my lab to my liking.”

“I, for one, did not sign up to be a do-gooder,” Eames said positively, firmly tapping his finger on the bar to make his point. 

“Who was the one saying we ought to charge Fisher for the therapy we did on his daddy issues?” Ariadne asked.

“No idea,” Eames said, grinning.

“So, are all the agents really going to go in?” Ariadne asked. “All of them?”

Cobb nodded. “I warned them, but they didn’t listen.”

“Do they want us in there too, when they go for real?”

“I should hope not,” Eames said quickly before Cobb could speak.

Ariadne glared at Eames. “Come on, we can’t just let them go alone.”

Before Eames could devise a witty comeback, Arthur spoke perhaps not-so-unexpectedly in Ariadne’s defense. “I’ll do it. They’re fast studies and quick on the draw; you saw the files I had on them. Their closed-case records are outstanding. If we have to do this anyway, better us than anyone else showing them how.”

“Was that an attempt at reverse psychology? Terrible. I’ll do it,” Eames said, signaling the waiter for champagne. 

“I’m in,” Ariadne said, as if it had been a foregone conclusion. From Ariadne’s far side, Yusef waggled a sheaf of papers with an FBI header; clearly he’d made his decision before they’d even left the building this afternoon.

Cobb smothered a grin. “All right, I’ll call Hotchner.”

\-----

“Well, you certainly move fast,” Eames said in greeting.

J.J. smiled as the extractors looked over the two rooms the FBI had outfitted for their training. It was supplied with well-upholstered office chairs, padded mats next to them for a kick, and a large selection of restoratives. It was a far cry from lawn chairs in an old warehouse, or half-broken beds in a fleabag motel, or the cramped confines of a train compartment. 

“Mr. Cobb had some suggestions already in place for his government clients,” she said smoothly.

“Wonderful.” Eames took a long drink of coffee and shot a glare over at Cobb.

“Thanks, J.J.,” Cobb said quickly, before the exchange could start to grow barbs. 

“Soon as you’re done, Hotchner wants everyone in the briefing room for a brainstorming session,” J.J. said.

“You seemed pretty gung-ho about getting trained. Why the delay?” Arthur asked.

“We want your insights _before_ we go jumping into each other’s heads. See you in ten,” she said briskly. J.J. was barely out the door before Eames turned on Cobb.

“You’re on a first-name basis with FBI agents?” he whispered, raising his eyebrow.

“Give it a rest, Eames. He’s been legit for three years,” Arthur cut in.

“Guys, seriously. People lost in their heads. Please tell me we aren’t going to be arguing about how we’re helping them,” Ariadne said.

“Of course we’re not,” Cobb said, his tone a little strained. Holding back from saying anything that was going to make it worse, he left for the briefing room.

The others followed slowly, shooting worried glances at each other behind Cobb’s back.


	2. Chapter 2

“Look at the way he does this,” Rossi said, tapping the pictures of the unmarred front doors equipped with expensive deadbolts and electronic keypads. “This unsub knows how to get inside the home without forcing the lock or tripping the alarms. He knows when his victims will be home, when they’ll be in bed, and when they’ll be alone. He knows how much time he’ll be able to have with them before he has to go.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Hotchner could see Arthur react very subtly, barely more than a tightening of his jaw, and Cobb barely less so. Was this kind of protocol standard for an extractor? From what little Cobb had said about his former profession, it would fit.

“So he’s definitely stalking his victims. Despite the varying physical type, these aren’t targets of convenience. His ‘type’ is behavior, not appearance. He’s going after very high-risk targets for a reason; they’re his preferred prey,” Morgan said confidently. 

“He wants the paranoid and well-protected. He’s delighting in defeating their security measures one by one until he has them,” Prentiss said. “He’s a security expert in all the vital areas: alarms, keys, guards, even handling guard dogs.” She pointed at something in the case file in front of her. “He tazered and drugged the security guards at Kaitlin Braymer’s house, and poisoned the guard dog at Ashley Sorenson’s. He defeats every aspect of their security, and then them.”

“And then their personal security,” Cobb added, making everyone look at him. “Their subconscious security.”

“What?” Rossi asked.

“I don’t know any of the victims personally, but if they were that careful about security _and_ in those high-profile positions, they might have had subconscious security. There are ways to train your subconscious to defend yourself against extraction. You can militarize your mind. I’ve been doing that for Pentagon officials for the past three years.”

“That’s a level no one anticipated. If that was the case, no wonder the therapists were thrown out. How can someone learn that? Do you always need a teacher, or can you teach yourself?” Hotchner asked.

“Someone generally has to teach you. If the victims went through public channels, it was probably someone with connections to the military. If it was private…” Cobb paused and gestured to himself. “-their teacher was an extractor, or rather, an ex-extractor, as far as anyone would admit. Most prefer a private sector tutor, because people think they have less of an agenda than a government one.”

He did not add the usual, “no offense intended.” Having worked with Erin Strauss for years, Hotchner didn’t ask for it.

“Would there be records?”

“Only if it was public. If it was private, they wouldn’t have it listed as ‘subconscious security training.’”

“For obvious reasons,” Eames muttered.

“It makes a nasty surprise for an extractor if no one knows you’re protected,” Arthur added, his tone very flat. Hotchner wondered at that, but filed away the question to ask at some other time.

“I doubt they would have gone through public channels. None of the victims were government or military. They were security conscious, but they were not ostentatious. So it’ll be listed under another expense. How long does it take to teach someone?” Prentiss asked. 

“It varies. The fastest time for me was five days, the slowest was four weeks. Ten days to two weeks is average, if the buyer is only training an hour or two of real time a day,” Cobb said. “It’s less intense than extracting.”

Hotchner pushed a button on the phone on the table.

 _“Yes, my liege?”_ a woman’s voice chirped from the other end of the line.

“Garcia, look for security consultations or training with an average duration of ten days to two weeks in their financials,” Hotchner said. “That could be how the unsub is finding his victims, and it would account for the frequent changes in location.”

 _“On it!”_ A click terminated the call abruptly.

“Now why can’t you do that, Arthur?” Eames asked. Arthur made a subtly rude gesture in Eames direction and didn’t waver his attention from the task at hand.

“We have a question for you all,” Rossi said.

“I think I know what it is,” Arthur said calmly.

“We have to ask it anyway. Does this sound like anyone you know?”

The extractors all looked at one another, Ariadne mostly in confusion, Eames, Arthur, and Cobb with deliberate thoughtfulness.

“No one that off the rails. You leave a trail of bodies behind you and no one hires you anymore,” Eames said. “The job is dramatic enough without making things difficult on purpose.”

Arthur and Cobb shook their heads. “I ran with a lot of people, but no one willing to try something like that on someone else,” Cobb said.

“I have a question,” Ariadne piped up. “If this guy is hurting these women like the therapists said, why don’t their projections fight back? After a while, even if he’s somehow tricked them into thinking they’re awake or something to get around their security, they’re going to imagine the cavalry coming to save them.”

“She’s right. The projections should be ripping this guy apart before he’s able to shove them into Limbo… if that’s what he’s doing. I don’t know any other way of keeping someone unconscious once they’re unhooked. You’d need a team to pull off something like that-.” Cobb stopped himself when the profilers sat up in interest.

“Multiple unsubs?” Morgan asked.

“It’s possible. The physical evidence has been scanty at best, and we’ve only recovered traces of one male at the scene. He’s pretty good at hiding his tracks. But if he had someone to assist him…” Reid trailed off as he looked at the case file with renewed interest, clearly trying different scenarios in his head. 

“If he has been doing this for a while, he would likely have contacts in the extractor community, even if none of you know of him personally,” Rossi said, not without sympathy

“Hang on,” Cobb said, leaning forward. “Anyone who would be this sadistic would have been kicked out from his group a long time ago. The last thing you want in this business is to be memorable. Any dream that intense could leave traces.” Cobb still wondered if Fisher ever dreamed of a snowy hospital or masked kidnappers.

“Could he have been caught before?”

Eames snorted. “They’ve just barely gotten around to outlawing extraction. It’s bloody difficult to prove unless you’re caught in the act.”

“So, unlikely. We’ll have Garcia run it anyway,” Rossi said.

“ _Is_ there anything that could paralyze projections?” Reid asked.

The extractors all laughed softly. “Wish there was. It would have made our jobs easier,” Eames said.

“You’re infiltrating the subconscious to find what you’re looking for. If you paralyzed the subconscious somehow, you wouldn’t be able to discover anything or have any interaction with the subject. And I’ve never been on a job where there have been no projections,” Cobb said. 

Hotchner thought he detected a slight hesitancy in Cobb’s explanation, but he let it pass for now.

“Even if he were a far better maze-builder than anyone I’ve ever seen, he can’t possibly hide from the projections for that long in dream time if he’s doing harm to the subject,” Arthur explained. “The mind will defend itself. He has to be using something to give him an edge.”

“Ok,” Hotchner said. “Mr. Cobb, then let’s bring your chemist into this. We need your professional opinion on the hard evidence we have. Morgan and Reid, J.J. and Prentiss, I want you to start on training now. We’re going to need as much time as we can get.” The chosen four stood up, ready to go immediately.

Cobb looked at his team, seeing what Hotchner was doing. Could he deal with his own team as effectively and smoothly? Could he bring as much professionalism to this job as the FBI?

“Arthur and Eames, Ariadne,” he said, splitting them into two groups. From what Arthur had found out, Morgan and Reid were likely to be the hardest to deal with in terms of mental landmines. Best to let the two more experienced extractors deal with them. Ariadne hadn’t done this for nearly as long, but she could definitely lay solid groundwork and give Prentiss and J.J. architect experience right off the bat. Besides, Cobb expected Arthur to keep his hand in everywhere; that was what he _did_. That didn’t even need to be said aloud.

“All right, let’s get to work,” Morgan said.

\----

Yusef had been in the conference room all morning, poring over the chemical analysis of the trace amounts of drug found at the crime scenes. He was so deep into his thoughts that he barely registered Cobb, Hotchner, and Rossi coming in and setting up right next to him.

Cobb pulled out his silver briefcase and laid it on the table next to the open PASIV from evidence. He had a faint crease across his forehead as he opened it up, and Hotchner could understand why as he saw Cobb’s normal unit side-by-side with the unsub’s.

“He’s modified this.”

“Very heavily,” Cobb said, looking the two units over carefully. “The Somnacin dose bottles are twice as big as normal. And it looks like there was something else that plugged in here and here-,” he pointed at the timer, “-that he must have taken with him. This was designed for a very long haul. I would never use a dose that large. You could dehydrate and die before coming back up.”

“That only bears out our prior theory. He’s not working alone,” Rossi said.

Yusef looked up from his print-outs and beautifully hand-written notes with a curious expression on his face, like he was impressed and disgusted at the same time. “This person is either making his own compound or working with someone who is. And the maker is a disgrace to his profession. This is a cruel mixture.”

“How so?”

“Each chemist has different techniques he prefers, different additives.”

“A signature,” Hotchner said.

“Very like.”

“Like a bomb-maker,” Rossi said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Yusef ignored Rossi as if he didn’t exist.

“The person has put a sedative in the compound, a very heavy one. He can take the subject very deep, and in that state any attempt at escape-.”

“Killing herself,” Cobb put in, his voice very slightly strained.

“Would drop her into Limbo. This combination is so heavy that he has to use a separate timer just to pull himself out of the dream. He wouldn’t even feel a kick.”

“A separate timer on a single unit?” Hotchner asked.

“That must be the wiring I couldn’t account for. He must have taken it with him.”

Yusef tapped the table softly to bring everyone’s attention back to the vial of straw-colored liquid. “In addition to the sedative, he’s put in some perception and mood-altering drugs into this mix. This is a very dangerous compound. The sensations would be intense, and there would be side effects. If he could drive soon after using this, I’d be surprised. There might be memory gaps, and certainly there would be errors in judgment.”

“Sounds like being hung over,” Rossi said ruefully.

“If the user isn’t dipping into illegal painkillers to stop the headache he has after using this, I would be surprised.”

“So we can add a pharmaceutical background and possible drug convictions to the profile, but how is he getting away from the scenes if he’s so impaired afterward? Taxi, public transport…” Hotchner paused and tapped the phone to get Garcia in the loop, repeating their newest round of speculations.

_“Hmm… No public transport in those areas, sports fans. I’ll start checking taxi records.”_

“If his partner was picking him up, someone might have noticed. I’ll get local PD to recanvas for unfamiliar vehicles,” Rossi said.

“Once you’re done, Dave, we better get started. Garcia’s going to need a lot more information to narrow our suspect pool down.” Hotchner looked over at Cobb as the man carefully closed his PASIV and picked up clean, sealed vials of Somnacin from Yusef.

“I’m ready whenever you are,” Cobb said, looking uncommonly grim.

\-----

In theory, everything about the ins and outs of extraction could be written on two sheets of paper. In practical application, it took a lot more than that. You could tell someone, “You can create anything,” in one breath, but until they saw and felt it for themselves, it was hard to make them truly believe it. 

In the beginning, the extractors made each profiler take turns first being the architect, then dreamer, just like they had when they started teaching Ariadne. Part of it was pure experimentation, to see who could create the best mazes. Part of it was caution, to see if anyone else had particularly paranoid projections. And part of it was simple curiosity; what could they build, if told they could make anything?

J.J.’s first world was small towns and city steps, with a thousand and one briefing rooms, police stations, and homey little houses offering oases of comfort. Rossi’s was a strange amalgam of opulent hotels and mansions with frightening back alleys that did not invite exploration.

Hotchner’s ended up as a city of solid homes bisected with rigid pockets of offices in almost mathematical precision. Occasional parks were wide open, but the homes were chock full of hiding places. Prentiss’ world was a pure pleasure to visit, an aesthetic melding of all the major European cities, with architectural flourishes that impressed even Ariadne.

Reid’s was hard to work with, an utter hodgepodge of university buildings with an agonizing amount of detail. He inevitably built the best mazes, spirals mixed with elaborate formulas that wound their ways through infinite varieties of libraries and classrooms. Dark places existed throughout, and everyone knew better than to venture into the woods. 

Morgan’s world was a combination of old and new, dilapidated buildings with walls torn out, fresh paint in weary rooms making them young again. It was in a constant state of reconstruction, which gave it plenty of places for people to hide.

The trick was that places to hide generally meant something was hiding there.

\-----

Eames’ eyes snapped open, as did Arthur’s a moment later. Extremely irritated, Eames stalked over to tip Morgan and Reid’s chairs on their sides.

“Would you do me a favor and stop bloody killing me?!”

Morgan stared at him blankly, still not quite awake, but Reid flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry!”

“Eames, ease up,” Arthur said, massaging his temples briefly. “It’s not their fault.”

Morgan picked himself up and hauled Reid to his feet. “Is that normal?”

“For you to kill us that fast when we weren’t doing anything? No,” Eames said testily.

“It would be excellent if you thought you were in danger of an extraction on yourself. It’s not so great when you’re trying to work with people towards a common goal,” Arthur clarified. “You have very aggressive projections, Morgan.”

“Maybe I should build this time,” Reid suggested. “I want to try some different traps in the mazes.”

“Anything that doesn’t involve me getting shot,” Eames said, sitting back down.

“I’ll be the subject,” Arthur said, which mollified Eames slightly. “Let’s try again.”

\-----

“Bloody hell,” Eames said, looking at the endless rows of books with trepidation. Between polished wooden cases and satin metal beams, the endless library was certainly one of the more unique dreams he’d ever been in.

“I haven’t been in enough libraries. Where’s the vault in a place like this?” Arthur asked. 

After almost a week into training the profilers, there was definitely progress was being made. Reid was probably the best maze-builder Arthur had ever seen, even better than Ariadne, though they tended to be so complex that only he could keep track of them. Good for hiding for projections, bad for finding information. In the spirit of that, they were letting Morgan try to be the subject again; Reid could probably keep them from getting killed long enough to thread the difficult maze. 

If they could extract here, then they were very close to being able to try their new-won talents on the three victims.

“The archives,” Reid said instantly. “In the basement.”

“All right, this is impressive. Any of the subjects librarians?” Eames asked. “Academians? Professors?” 

Reid shook his head. “Lawyer, VP, marketing director,” he said ruefully.

“Well, still,” Eames said. “If one had ever been at university…”

“Which you haven’t,” Arthur said pointedly.

“It could be useful. Go on, show us the vault,” Eames said, ignoring Arthur’s jab.

Reid led the way past scores of students thoroughly engrossed in their books.

“ _Now_ your projections behave,” Arthur muttered, with a sideways glance at Morgan. He shrugged.

“I always hit the books hard enough to get bruises. I was here-.”

“Not _here_ ,” Reid said quickly, a stickler for accuracy, and that was so very important for what they were doing right now.

“At college on a football scholarship,” Morgan amended. “Then I blew out my knee.” Eames winced in sympathy. “Besides, my mother would have let me have it if I hadn’t gotten on the Dean’s List.”

Reid led them down a few staircases (behind three different doors and down four twisting corridors) and onto an elevator. A couple projections started to glance at them, and Morgan took a quiet, steadying breath.

“What are we looking for?” he asked. 

Someone yelled beyond the elevator doors in reaction to his nervousness, and Eames looked exasperated.

“Whatever you want to put in there. This is just a dry run. When you talk to your subject, you steer the conversation so that whatever secret you’re trying to find is the one in the vault,” Arthur explained very calmly, but also very quickly. This had always been around the point when Morgan’s projections started swarming them. 

Morgan relaxed, and the yelling stopped.

“I’ve worked with Cobb for five years. I never knew all his secrets,” Arthur added. Unsaid but seen was the way the two extractors took in the surface of what they saw but didn’t inquire about any details that didn’t pertain to the exercise. Perhaps it was all for their benefit, but Morgan doubted it.

‘Sometimes you see things, but unless it affects the job…” Arthur trailed off.

“I’ve got enough to think about with pissing off more people accidentally,” Eames added cheerfully. “Besides, you’re rather lethally defensive, and I’ve died enough for one week.”

\-----

“You’re a forger?” Prentiss asked.

Eames smiled broadly, reflected in the glossy black marble walls as a thin blonde woman. “Always a useful skill. Sometimes you don’t have time to gain a subject’s trust yourself.”

“So you make yourself a figure of trust.”

“A pretty woman is often welcome with some types.”

“Or?”

“You observe someone else the subject trusts and forge them. It’s a con job, when it’s all said and done, only a lot more fun.”

The woman was gone between blinks, and Eames’ usual appearance returned.

“Can all extractors do that?”

Eames chuckled. “Oh, no. Most try to learn, but not everyone has the mental flexibility to want to be someone else.” The arrogance in that statement was backed up by the flawless imitation Emily had just seen. If she hadn’t known it was Eames, if she hadn’t seen him shift, she wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.

Prentiss smiled. “And that’s why you asked which one of us had ever done undercover work.”

“I know Morgan said he had, but I’ve been killed by him quite enough, thank you.”

Prentiss had to hold back laughter at that. Arthur had made a small betting pool on how many times they were getting killed in a day, and Reid had been cleaning up on it.

“Besides, I’ve seen you build. I think I recognize buildings from half the countries in Europe. You don’t make that kind of detail unless you’ve been there, or have studied it. And I don’t think you’re an architectural student.”

“Diplomat’s daughter,” Prentiss confessed.

“So, you wanted to fit in every time you moved. You learned the local languages and customs. You tried to become one of them every time, right?”

These extractors had a lot more in common with profilers than they let on. In many ways, their jobs were eerily the same. Eames’ question cut far too close to the bone for Prentiss’ comfort.

“Right,” she said shortly.

“So, you didn’t just play a part to get close to some naughty boy so you could bring him to justice. You really _wanted_ to be someone else, at least for a while. That’s what makes it work. Most everyone else is too tied up in who they are.” 

Prentiss could see Eames’ passion; for a moment, he was stripped of his trademark sarcastic wit. _This_ was what drew him to extraction, the same way Ariadne was drawn by building. Whatever con jobs he did in the real world, those were just to keep him in bread and butter. When Ariadne had shown her and J.J. how to build, Prentiss could see the joy on her face, a pure pleasure in creation that made her understand how a seeming-student could become part of an illegal criminal enterprise. 

Now Eames’ true reason for extraction shone through. He loved this; he wanted this more than anything else. Exercising this deception gave him what he needed-.

“You think the unsub is forging?” she asked. “To gain his victim’s trust?”

“He certainly could be.” Eames shrugged. “It’s one way of disarming your subject.”

Prentiss shook her head to clear it from speculation and focused on the task at hand. When they went into the victims’ minds, it would be a hell of a lot easier negotiating them if the subject’s subconscious didn’t think she was a threat. Having two forgers available would double their chances.

She took a deep breath (firmly ignoring the pointlessness of breathing in a dream; think about that too hard and you could think yourself crazy) and thought of her subject. Skin and bone, the way of walking, posture, texture of the skin, color of the hair, typical clothing, the usual tone of voice… Between one blink and the next, Eames was facing Aaron Hotchner.

“Well?” he/she asked, moving her/his hands with a very faint show of surprise at their differing size.

Eames carefully walked around Prentiss, tweaking the fold of the jacket and pointing out the lay of the hair in the polished marble wall. He finally nodded.

“Not bad. You see him every day, practically, so he should be easy. You’re not going to get so lucky, usually. I have a few people I use for general distractions,” he raised his eyebrow suggestively, and for a second, blonde hair cascaded down his back, “But most of the time you’re being someone’s brother, or girlfriend or mistress or wife.” He grinned widely at that. “And that can be a hell of a lot of fun.”

Prentiss’ return smile was rueful and a little bitter. “I guess it would be, in a dream.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them to stare at the wall. “Ok, who?”

“Ariadne,” Eames called out.

Prentiss let her dark hair lighten and her features soften as she tried to become someone else. Eventually someone a traumatized victim would trust.

\-----

“Pointman? That’s what your job is called?” Morgan asked. He handed Arthur a bottle of water as he waited for his coffee to brew.

Arthur nodded. “I do background research, scout out locations, and help provide a second layer. Basically act as the extractor’s second set of hands.”

Morgan looked like he was holding back laughter. 

“What?”

“Garcia, our analyst. She does a lot of those kinds of things for us.”

Arthur looked interested, and Morgan waved him towards another set of corridors. They needed to take several breaks between training sessions to keep themselves sharp, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to check up on what Garcia had been doing with the information and speculation they’d given her in the past few days. They were hoping to get the suspect pool cut down at least a little.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Inside her electronic sanctum, Penelope Garcia was currently smashing her top scores on Tetris while running searches on everything the teams had figured out about the unsub thus far. What brought Arthur up short wasn’t the multitasking, it was her wardrobe. She was wearing a dress in an eye-smarting shade of blue, with orange and red accents. Brilliant orange shoes contrasted with a red belt, and explosions of blue and red glitter seemed to be coming from her copper-colored hair. A rainbow of plastic rings and bracelets decorated her arms and hands. 

“Hey, Baby Girl.”

Garcia spun around, clicking a key to pause her game, and turned her smile on full blast. “What brings you do the throne of the Queen of All Knowledge, tall, dark and handsome?” she asked cheerfully.

“I thought you might like to meet one of the extractors. Arthur, Penelope Garcia.”

“Hey,” she said, suddenly shy.

“Hello-.” Arthur barely got the word out when the computers beeped. Garcia turned back to them and rapidly scanned through the results.

“Derek, looks like this nasty may have had half a dozen prior attempts. Two interrupted break-ins and one home invasion, plus three other people in transient housing found in their rooms on what they thought was a near OD, in that order. All had Somnacin in common. The victims; descriptions of the perp- those that saw him at all -were similar, though the guy went masked. One report does mention a silver briefcase. All of these in SoCal.”

“That fits the profile. He was trying to get at his victims more directly before he switched to stalking to give himself more time. We knew he couldn’t be a first-time offender,” Morgan said. “And that gives us a base of initial operations.”

“Exactamundo. I’m going to track down the lead detectives and see if anyone has more info that didn’t get put at my fingertips.”

Morgan leaned over to give her a kiss on the top of her head. “You’re amazing.”

“You only say that because it’s true!” She waved at Arthur. “Nice to meet you.”

Morgan steered Arthur out as Garcia turned back to her precious data gathering, and repressed a chuckle at Arthur’s stunned expression. Comparing Arthur’s restrained and severe sense of style to Garcia’s colorful flamboyance was enough to make his week.

He saw Arthur surreptitiously pull out his loaded die totem from his hip pocket and roll it inside his loose fist. Morgan couldn’t repress the burst of laughter.

“Garcia’s from her own reality; a totem won’t help,” he said. Morgan put his hand in his pocket and ran a finger along his own totem, a heavy screw with a stripped-out head. It was one he’d kept from one of his first renovation projects.

Arthur cracked a faint smile and put the die away. “You got me. I thought you’d manage to dream up my exact opposite.”

“Oh, I couldn’t dream up Garcia. You haven’t seen her in my head, have you?”

Arthur considered the projections he’d seen when Morgan had been the dreamer and shook his head. 

“But if we need a distraction…”

“Oh no, Garcia’s the one and only. Come on, we better get back to work.”

\-----

Ariadne watched as Reid twisted the world around them. 

He created covered pits, snares, locked doors and spike strips, traps to stop projections intent on his destruction. She’d opened her mouth to warn him that he’d just be attracting unwanted attention, but Arthur had put his hand on her arm to silence her.

“He’ll remember this more clearly if he figures it out on his own,” he murmured.

Ariadne shook her head. She’d seen Reid build, had seen the dark corners he tended to create in even the brightest dreamscapes; his was not a mind that needed more unexpected trauma.

“They’ll be coming for you,” she called.

Reid looked up as Arthur’s projections began to convene on the plaza. His face a mask of concentration, he opened up pits under their feet, blocked their way with buses, and locked doors against them.

Ariadne raised an eyebrow at Arthur, the “Yes, I _do_ know what I’m doing,” look. Arthur didn’t bat an eyelash, silently supporting her decision. Reid lasted far longer than they expected him to, and using his traps and twisting corridors to fight to the bitter end, actually survived to hear the musical cue.

When Ariadne opened her eyes, Reid looked remarkably calm and composed. The first few times she’d built, Ariadne knew she’d been a lot more unsettled. For all the wonder and instinctual understanding, creating and manipulating a dreamscape wasn’t easy, and Reid had just pulled a hell of a trick in defending himself. If he’d been a real extractor, he’d have more work than he could ever do. Ariadne smiled at him in encouragement as he slowly sat up.

“That was harder than I thought it would be,” Reid said, rubbing his head almost ruefully.

“You didn’t die,” Arthur said. “That’s all that really matters. You’re going to be able to keep everyone safe once we do this for real.”

Reid nodded, looking sad and resigned. “Then I think we’re ready. The victims have waited long enough.”

\-----

Cobb looked down at the still form of Jessica Rand and felt a surge of guilt. He hadn’t let himself think about the victims too much when he’d been teaching the profilers; he couldn’t. Letting that kind of worry and stress into his subconscious while he was teaching other people could be a recipe for disaster, and he knew it. But he’d still known, in the back of his mind, the reason for putting Hotchner’s team through grueling extraction training at the fastest pace possible. Each of the three victims had been fading a little at a time, day by day, their minds retreating in a misguided effort to save themselves from some kind of pain.

“Mr. Cobb?” Hotchner asked quietly. 

“Everyone ready?” Cobb asked, turning to his team for the run into Jessica’s mind. He, Eames, Hotchner, Morgan, and Reid would try their luck with the first victim, while Arthur, Ariadne, Rossi, Prentiss, and J.J. would make their own attempt to gather clues in Kaitlin’s subconscious, the second of the victims. Neither was sure what they would find, and they didn’t want to risk smaller teams. 

“Let’s see if we can find what this son of a bitch left behind,” Morgan said, looking fiercely determined as he lay back in his chair near Jessica’s hospital bed.

Cobb looked over at the others, hooked up and ready, and finally nodded at the nurse. She pushed the button on the PASIV, sending them into sleep.

\--

Morgan found himself sitting at a table, drinking a cup of coffee as Reid picked up his cup from the barista. Hotchner was sitting in a corner, reading the paper, while Cobb and Eames talked at another table. The coffee shop should have been a warm, inviting place, but something about it repelled him. Reid had designed this level, a common enough place to hopefully not alarm Jessica, but something was pressing down in Reid’s design.

The walls and floors looked grimy, the air was chill, and the conversation around them was in short, terrified-sounded whispers. Taking a closer look at the projections, many of them bore signs of violence, bruises or cuts on their faces and arms. 

Morgan gingerly walked over to join the extractors, Reid trailing behind him. “Have you ever seen this before?”

They shook their heads. “It’s like he roughed up her whole subconscious.”

“As much time as he had in here…” Cobb trailed off, more than a little disturbed by what he was seeing. He’d never seen someone subconscious mar an architect’s design like this before.

“Come on, we know she’s not here,” Hotchner said over their shoulders. “Let’s get looking.”

\-----

“These are just projections. Where’s the subject?” Arthur asked. 

“I haven’t seen her.” Rossi turned down another dream corridor, only be faced with more blank-faced and beaten projections listlessly walking from room to room. 

“Wait, try here,” Prentiss said, pausing outside a door half-concealed by a trick of shadow and perspective.

Arthur palmed open a small door and Rossi cursed fervently. Prentiss looked over his shoulder and blinked in confusion. Their victim, Kaitlin, was tied to a bed, a PASIV unit hooked up to her arm.

“Two levels,” Arthur stated. “Damn it, I thought only Cobb could do that.”

“He learned this from Cobb?” Prentiss asked.

Arthur rounded on him so fast the walls actually pulsed in anger. Ariadne took a step back in surprise, almost bumping into Rossi.

“No,” he said flatly. “Extractors know it can be done, but most can’t do it very well. The dreams collapse under their own weight, even at two levels.” 

Ariadne incongruously stifled a snort, and J.J. looked at her strangely.

“If he can do this, he’s been practicing for a long time. The mix he was using probably helped a lot,” Arthur explained.

“All right, so how do you do two levels?” Prentiss asked impatiently.

“You leave someone up here to hold the dream in place, and then you plug yourself into this PASIV and follow her down,” Ariadne explained. “But you’d need a kick to get back up again…”

“We’re not following her down on a standard Somnacin mix anyway,” Arthur said. “Kaitlin can hold multiple levels in her own mind, but if we start mucking around in here, we could end up collapsing everything unless she was sedated.”

“She’s in a _coma,_ ” Rossi snapped.

“Would you like to be caught under two or three levels of collapsing dreamscape? I wouldn’t,” Arthur said testily. “Not even in a comatose subject. I thought we were hunting for clues.”

“We are,” Prentiss said firmly. “Let’s go before you two collapse this thing on your own.”

\-----

“If you look at the patterns of injuries on the projections, they show a great degree of similarity. It’s almost symmetrical,” Reid said. “Eight-five percent similar to the marks on Jessica’s dream body.”

Reid’s careful examination of the “physical” damage to Jessica was the only thing helping Hotchner keep his demeanor perfectly calm. He’d seen the clues of the sadistic nature of the unsub all over Jessica’s subconscious, and he had carefully revised his mental profile to include a few new definitions of cruelty. He was going to have Garcia add restraining orders to her searches because any man who would go to these lengths to torture women like this had clearly attempted to do so in the past. His controlling behavior would have started early.

Morgan, however, had not welcomed the news that Jessica’s conscious mind was on a second level down, nor that this was a trick Cobb himself was known for.

“So it still could be someone you know,” Morgan said.

“We don’t know everyone in that field,” Cobb said wearily. He was reluctant to start blithely naming names in the extractor community, of setting the FBI on the trail of people that had, until recently, been his co-workers. His _kind_.

“You can give us a start. This man is a monster.”

Eames rolled his eyes at Cobb dancing around the subject and the profilers’ pressuring questions, and he unceremoniously shot Cobb in the head. Morgan and Reid’s protests were drowned out by the building collapsing on top of them.

“I thought you were sick of getting killed,” Morgan said as he woke up.

“For Eames, that’s practically hello,” Cobb muttered. Eames fluttered his eyelashes as he took the needle out of his arm.

Arthur and Prentiss appeared in the doorway. Both were grim-faced.

“She’s on a second level,” Prentiss said. 

“At least,” Arthur added.

“So is Jessica. I’d bet Ashley’s the same way,” Cobb said. “We need to talk, now.”

\-----

“The projections, they’re deteriorating,” Cobb said. “The damage to the projections, the state of the dream itself, it’s like it’s collapsing in slow motion. If we go deeper, I don’t know if there’s going to be anything left of them to work with. Our presence could make what’s left of the dream collapse.”

“They’ve been badly traumatized. They’re withdrawing and retreating so they can’t be hurt, going comatose along with the victim’s mind,” Rossi said. “From what you described, Kaitlin’s mind wasn’t quite as bad as Jessica’s.”

“I think we need to try to follow them down as far as we can,” Hotchner said. “It’s likely the unsub became more personal on deeper levels. The farther he was inside his comfort zone, the more likely he would be to be careless.”

Cobb tried not to look as worried as he felt. Inside though, he felt like he was rapidly getting out of his depth. He’d never been inside the mind of someone that badly hurt, someone who’d been tortured for days (effectively years in dream time) at the hands of a master sadist. He’d been in the mind of people with issues, and even there things could be amplified all out of proportion. This level of damage… this was beyond his comfort zone. He didn’t know how effective he could be; he didn’t know how he would be able to stand continuing to do what was effectively a dreamscape autopsy. None of these women was going to wake up again. There would be no saving them like he had with Saito.

“Dom,” Ariadne said softly, giving him a look of earnestness tempered by a haunted look in her eyes. “Please. We have to try.”

“Garcia’s got our list of names down to a dozen. I know none of you recognize them, but we’re getting closer,” Rossi promised. “We’re going to be able to end this.”

Cobb could practically hear what he’d told Hotchner over a week ago, _“I’m working off a few lifetimes’ worth of bad karma.”_

\-----

The second level was worse. Here the damage was far more spectacular, enough so that even Hotchner, who had gone through several levels of hell in the past few years, looked a little green. The walls crumbled at a touch, projections lay half-crushed underneath them, and those that still walked stumbled on shattered bone and shrieked at the touch of the wind against their flayed, raw skin.

It hadn’t even required any discussion to attempt to find Jessica as quickly as possible. Cobb wished the profilers luck in attempting to get knowledge out of this charnel house; he and Eames were far too busy locating their subject. So busy they could not, would not, pay too much attention to the horror around them.

At the center of the crumbling city, they found her, curiously undisturbed and whole compared to her projections. With a needle in her arm with little sign of violence upon her, her face was still soaked with tears with her hands clenched into fists, her nails digging bloody gouges into her palms.

“This is the second level…” Reid said slowly, looking down at Jessica’s too-still form. “How many more levels can there be?”

“Nothing beyond two, not with all the damage he’s done. Down below this is Limbo.” Cobb stared at the girl and swore silently. He did not, did _not_ think he could handle that twice. Hotchner saw his hesitation, and he put his hand on the girl’s wrist.

“We can’t save her if we die.”

“There is no time down there. It’s possible.” Cobb heard himself saying it, and his voice sounded so different, haunted, he wondered who was talking.

“You’ve done this before,” Hotchner stated.

“Once on purpose. Once not. You don’t want to do this.”

“ _You_ don’t want to do this,” Hotchner corrected gently. “You know it’s been too long to save them. Jessica’s vital signs are slipping every day.” Cobb let his breath out in an explosive sigh and nodded in agreement.

“Hotch, this place looks like bombed-out Baghdad. The unsub could have a military record. Makes sense considering where PASIV technology came from and why he’s so experienced at it,” Morgan said, unobtrusively inserting his comment into the tense moment.

“The flaying could be symbolic,” Reid put in. “He wanted these women to know they could hide nothing from him. He’s likely been rejected recently before the start of the first incident, probably something job-related.”

“Is this all we’re going to get?” Eames asked, not impatiently, not smiling in this terrible place.

“Very likely,” Hotchner said.

“And you think he’ll do it again.” It wasn’t a question.

“Rossi and Prentiss checked Ashley’s mind earlier today. It was a slaughterhouse. He’s getting a real taste for this,” Morgan said.

“Then I think I can teach Prentiss a few more tricks to help if we catch this bastard in the act,” Eames said. “And I rather think time isn’t on our side.”

\-----

Eames sat in the half-ruined corner of the café, watching Emily Prentiss practice the form of the strong, independent Vera Braymer, mother of Kaitlin. Though both Emily and Vera had outwardly similar personalities, there were nuances in behavior that could trip up a paranoid subject. Poor Kaitlin might not able to be revived, even at her “mother’s” urging, but it would be an important test for Emily to be able to be accepted.

And yet all of this preparation and practice was not even for the real job. Arthur had been appalled at how the profilers had only days, sometimes hours or even minutes to figure out how to interact with their subject. The shortest job Eames had ever pulled had had a week’s prep time (barring a few clusterfucks from when he’d been starting out that, frankly, sometimes he’d been surprised he’d avoided jail or death from). The Fisher job had had several months of prep, even if they’d had to do a lot of condensing and improvising in the end.

That was one area in which Eames would give the profilers kudos. They were fast studies and good at shooting from the hip. Both teams were good at reading people, though the extractors were a lot better at evading projections. The agents weren’t used to having to run for their lives from an angry mob every time they tried to talk to a subject. The extractors weren’t used to that ability to fall back on authority; in the dream world, your team was all the back-up you had. There was no way to call for reinforcements.

Emily called for her “daughter,” gratified and pleased when the remaining projections seemed to welcome her and relax their sorrowful air. It was as close to victory as they were going to get in here.

The thin sound of piano music, Debussy’s _Clair de Lune_ , penetrated the dream, and moments later they both woke up.

“All right?” Cobb asked. Emily was shaking her head slightly and rubbing her arms, dispelling the physical ghost of Vera Braymer’s body. 

“I’m fine,” she said calmly.

Eames nodded at both Cobb and Hotchner. “You’ll do,” he said to Emily, a smile adding emphasis to his spare praise. She was good at playing a role: the only hard part for her was getting used to the medium.

“Jessica Rand died an hour ago,” Rossi announced. Emily tightened her lips in anger for another life lost. The only comfort was that death was probably a relief for Jessica.

“Once that hits the media, he’ll look for another victim,” Hotchner said. “He probably already has one in mind. He’s been watching her since he took Ashley, possibly even sooner.”

“Get ready to move at a moment’s notice. This is it,” Rossi said, looking at Cobb.

“You’re not taking twelve people down there, are you?” Cobb asked incredulously.

“You said he’s probably working with a partner, most likely a chemist, and our profile agrees with you. His partner has given our unsub some ideas, and those didn’t come out of nowhere. This man has experience too. It’s likely they’ll start double-teaming.”

“How the hell can you know that?” Eames asked.

“They’ve been hunting together for several victims. It creates a profound bond. The chemist has pushed the boundaries for the extractor, so the extractor will reciprocate to keep the balance of power even. He needs bigger thrills, and being able to swap stories will keep the rush longer. It’s very likely we could be looking at a double attack the next time he strikes.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hotchner could hear the agitation in Garcia’s voice even through the fog of fatigue from being woken up out of a sound- and dreamless -sleep.

_“Sir, I know you’re probably in bed, but I was running all those databases and the searches from what you gave me from your session the other day, and I finally got into some of the sealed military records-.”_

Hotchner did not bother to ask how Garcia had done that.

_“And combined that with everything else you’d given me and I have a name. William Thomas, ex-military, dishonorable discharge, now a security consultant, wife left him last year, and she has a restraining order out against him. He’s been hired by every one of the victims, but they concealed that fact through some pretty clever legal wrangling. Not as clever as me, of course.”_

Fatigue fled, banished in a rush of adrenaline.

“Garcia, has he-.”

 _“Since there’s no record that any of the victims knew each other, no red flags went up,_ but _since this is likely our guy I went and looked at the security systems for his remaining clients and one of them had her home security system turn off on its own an hour ago. I have an address for one Valerie Jenkins, it’s local, and I’m going to call the others now.”_

“Get the extractors on standby,” Hotchner said, grabbing clothing as quickly as possible. “And contact local PD!”

_“Already on it!”_

\-----

The house was dark when the police and FBI arrived, silent and buttoned up for the night. The alarms were still in place, but a sweep of the ground found the guard dogs dead in their kennels from poisoned food, only hours ago. Hotchner felt a kind of nauseated triumph from that news; the unsub might still be inside. They still had a chance to save one of his victims, if they were willing to put their heads in the lion’s mouth. 

“He could still be in there. Go.”

The cops began their sweep of the house, Hotchner’s team right behind them. He knew there was only one likely place for the unsub to be, and he followed the cops right up to the bedroom. Inside was Valerie Jenkins, pale and still on her own bed. Next to her was William Thomas: their unsub, thin, fit, with pale hair still in a military cut. Between them was a custom-built PASIV, with a line running into each of them. Exactly like the crime scene photos of the other three victims.

“What’s the ETA on the extractors?” Hotchner called over his shoulder, kneeling to check Valerie’s pulse. Still strong under his fingers. He turned his attention to Thomas, frisking him carefully, taking away a gun and a phone, and cuffing him to the chair as a precaution. Rossi snatched up the phone with a loose rubber glove and checked it. 

“There’s an alarm set for later tonight. Looks like he was expecting a pick-up.”

“Hotch, we have a problem,” Prentiss said, coming in the doorway. She held two purses in her hand. “Valerie has a sister living with her.”

“He’s double-teaming. Go, find her.”

Prentiss was out the door before Hotchner was finishing talking.

“Rossi, call the extractors in as soon as they get here; send Cobb and Eames here with Yusef, Arthur and Ariadne with you, Prentiss, and J.J.”

\-----

Prentiss checked the door to the basement room, and found it locked. The arrogance of Thomas was incredibly off-putting, a deliberate taunt. That there had been two victims in the house should have warned the extractor off. Instead he’d taken the challenge and turned it into an accelerated attack, drawing his partner deeper into his fantasies.

The keys in Valerie’s purse opened the room, revealing her sister, Annette, and a man who had to be the chemist. Thomas’ silent partner, the one who’d created a drug mix so “cruel” as to help inflict that hellish damage on three other women. The scene could have been a mirror of the one above, down the last detail.

“Prentiss, extractors are in!” Rossi called down the stairs. J.J. came in right ahead of Arthur, her mouth set in a grim line. Arthur strode over to the PASIV and Prentiss saw his shoulders relax slightly. 

“Standard dosage size and faster timer than the one upstairs. He’s supposed to wake up before Thomas.”

“What about the compound?” Rossi asked. Just because the chemist supplied Thomas with his ammunition of choice didn’t mean he used the same.

“I can’t say. We’ll just have to assume it’s something non-standard.”

“Ok, I’ll handle the transfer,” J.J. said quickly. “Yusef taught me how. Go get her.” Arthur handed her the vials of Yusef’s Somnacin mix, as well as a case with delicate syringes. No one was willing to risk going into a dream with a drug so heavy it was impossible to be kicked out of, not when they were not the ones in control of the dream. Yusef had figured out how to dilute an active mix with another, his own project during the time when the extractors had been teaching.

Thank God J.J. had taken it upon herself to learn. She always did take care of her team.

Prentiss and Rossi quickly checked Annette’s purse and phone, finding pictures of her sister, her mother, and her boyfriend. Prentiss quick look around the room to gather what other clues she could, and that was it. Rossi was doing the same, opening drawers, quickly checking Annette’s computer, and absorbing information about Annette’s life, both of them calling out bits to each other. They would need everything they could to save her.

“Let’s go,” Rossi said. “I’ll hold the top.” That was likely to have the most aggressive projections, and Rossi was a far better shot than anyone else.

“I’ll take second,” Arthur said, glancing at Ariadne. She had experience in Limbo, and Emily would need that experience at her side if they had to go down there. He prayed they wouldn’t.

J.J. frisked the chemist, a slight, dark, rat-like man with a pinched mouth and bulging eyes, as the others got ready, laying themselves down on the carpeted floor. He carried what looked like a can of mace in a pocket, along with vials, wires, and tools in a bag. Emily figured they were for the strange timers, something he’d had to tweak at the last minute.

Rossi was the last to settle the needle in his veins. With a nod at J.J., she pressed the button.

\-----

Reid did not want that horrible compound in his veins. It felt both cold and burned hot at the same time, and there was a split second of a horrible taste in the back of his mouth before he went under. When he opened his eyes, the world around him shifted unpleasantly, a weird euphoria roiling his gut. Thomas’ compound, with its additives, making the experience “better” for him. 

They were back in Valerie’s house, a logical choice if the unsub didn’t want to give his victim the option that this was not real. Reid listened hard for her, and he heard screaming coming from the basement. He turned and nearly ran into Morgan as they began to move downstairs. Hotchner stopped them, one hand raised for silence, the other gripping his Glock. Further along the corridor, Cobb and Eames pressed themselves against the wall, watching and waiting.

Nodding slowly, Hotchner pressed forward, halting when the screaming moved outside. Carefully moving to avoid blind spots, they pressed themselves to the windows. Outside was not Valerie’s residential street, but downtown in a large city, empty of cars, but full of foot traffic. The pedestrians trotted along the sidewalks, sweeping themselves towards the south. The screams began to fade in that direction, and Hotchner signaled the others. Out the door, they moved through the alleys, working their way south, following Valerie’s voice into a district of plazas and warehouses.

She was still fighting, and while she still fought, they had a chance.

\-----

Rossi shook his head, disgusted at the thick swathes of smoke that wreathed the opulent room. The chemist had gone very old school in his dream, creating something along the lines of an opium den to snare Annette.

“Clever in some ways,” Arthur muttered.

“Why? So he can subdue her projections?” Ariadne asked.

“This could be a façade. He could be more aggressive farther down,” Prentiss said. She shook her head slightly; the smoke was making her feel like she’d just drunk a bottle of tequila. The chemist must have had some of the same illegal compounds in his mix as Thomas. Staying alert was going to be a bitch.

“And it wouldn’t matter to him what happened to his self here, as long as he could get to Annette?” Ariadne half-asked.

“Exactly,” Prentiss said. “It’s his first solo show.”

Arthur looked sideways along the corridors and gestured to the right, where the smoke was thickest. “This way.”

\------

“Why are Valerie’s projections trying to defend that warehouse? Shouldn’t they be trying to get in to her?” Reid asked.

“Should be, but they’re not,” Eames muttered. “What the hell…”

“It’s him,” Cobb breathed suddenly. “The projections are him. He’s the dreamer, not the subject. He’s using his subconscious, his projections as the weapon.”

“He had it set up so she was the subject first…” Hotchner said.

“And then switched it.”

“That’s what the breakers are for. So he can switch mid-dream. He loses control of the world but gets to focus all his attention on hurting her instead of trying to hide from her,” Eames said, snapping his fingers.

“Two can play at that game,” Morgan said darkly. 

Cobb bit his tongue before he could say anything stupid, like “It couldn’t be done.” He was the poster child for pushing the boundaries of the dream world; Mal had tragically proved that when she’d pushed herself into his dreams for years. He’d built upon the impossible before. Certainly the profilers could. 

“You said I have a lethal subconscious. Let’s see what he can do against me.”

Hotchner nodded in approval, and Eames shot Cobb a wildly bemused glance. PASIVs were set up to accommodate up to eight users, but Thomas’ had that extra wiring, and breakers had been at every connection point. It certainly wasn’t out of the question for another user to try to take control. Morgan looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and concentrated. Reid felt something shift under his feet, a tickle in his mind, and shouting and pounding started on the other side of the door.

“Got you, you bastard,” Morgan muttered.

Eames smiled, his eyes a little unfocused. “You’re all marvelously insane.”

“You can thank me later,” Morgan said, peering out the window.

“So… you subconscious is fighting his subconscious. How does that work?”

“Don’t think,” Hotchner muttered. “Just don’t think about it. Let’s move.”

\-----

Yusef started as Thomas’ PASIV began to click, his modifications opening and closing connections on several of the lines. He watched it, fascinated, even as he kept up the careful dilution of Thomas’ compound with his own. It was as if the PASIV were switching the primary dreamer around, or even allowing control for multiple users simultaneously. Assuming, of course, that wouldn’t make the whole dream collapse in a psychedelic acid trip from hell, professionally speaking.

He increased the flow as much as he dared. The sooner they could get out of there, the better.

\-----

Rossi looked down at the still form of both Annette and the chemist, lying on piles of plush cushions. Although they looked uncommonly peaceful, the minute he and Arthur had locked the door, the sleepers outside had awakened. The projections were finally taking an interest in the proceedings. 

“Why now?” Prentiss muttered, pulling out lines from the PASIV that bound tormentor and victim to feed to her rescuers. “Why would her projections come to her defense now?”

“I really don’t care at this point,” Rossi said shortly. “Go on.”

The door boomed behind them, the sounds following Prentiss and the others down into the next dream.

\-----

The unsub’s projections were under attack from Morgan’s, and they were losing badly. Whatever this man thought he was, he wasn’t used to fighting for his life. The projections began to run from Morgan, sprinting through the mazes of Reid’s creation with uncertainty and confusion. By the look on Reid’s face, he was bringing his traps on-line, taking full advantage of the unholy mess Thomas had made of the rules of extraction. There would be no place for them to hide and ambush them.

“Let’s go,” Hotchner said. “We have to get to Valerie before he recovers.”

“Are you all right holding this up, Morgan? Because we can’t leave two people on this level. You’re going to have to protect us,” Cobb said. 

“I’ll just trade off with him.” 

“Morgan, if we’re following her down, you can’t be the subject.” 

“I’ll handle it, Hotch.” Morgan lifted the substantial barrel of the M5.

“Don’t be afraid to imagine what you like,” Eames said with a grin. “I like grenade launchers.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

The sprint across the plaza was mercifully unpeppered by gunfire or screaming assailants, letting Hotchner’s team get into the warehouse that Thomas had been defending so vigorously. Inside were Valerie, Thomas, lawn chairs, and his damned PASIV.

Cobb fed the lines out to everyone who was descending, sticking himself with the needle with the ease of long experience. Morgan nodded at Hotchner as he dosed himself and waited just long enough for the others. Then all went black.

\--

“Reid, I don’t care for your taste,” Eames said, opening his eyes in the second-level dream.

“You’re welcome,” Reid said flatly, looking around for trouble. The halls of the library were spacious, and enough gaps existed that it would be difficult to sneak up on them. Then again, finding Valerie could be difficult. Reid picked up a reference book that was right at hand, and he took a look at the index. Then he smiled; books had always been his friends, and in this dream, that was no exception. Valerie Jenkins was neatly catalogued in the non-fiction section, alphabetically. “This way!”

\-----

Arthur shook his head. “You’re joking, right?”

“You said yourself that Annette would have been a lot more aggressive, because she was trained to defend herself, just like her sister. But the chemist wasn’t trained; he never needed to be. This is the mind of someone untrained, someone who is used to being protected, behind the scenes, unnoticed. He didn’t make the first level into something she would feel at ease in, he made it for himself, so he would feel comfortable. Same with this level. This isn’t just his dream, this is _him_ ,” Prentiss insisted. 

Arthur stopped himself from shaking his head, and he took a second critical look around the corridors. There was a reason the profilers were so good at their jobs. They did the kind of raw reading of a room that usually took him days of study to achieve. In this instance, in this dream, Prentiss had a solid point.

Ariadne looked down the corridors of the elegant, endless laboratory, and nodded in agreement with Prentiss’ outrageous statement. The chemist had taken Annette inside _himself_ …

“Arthur, you’ve been in Yusef’s lab, right?” Ariadne asked urgently.

“Yes, but-.”

“So where’s the vault? He’s trying to hide himself like an extractor would, because he didn’t expect other real extractors to try to get in here. Where is it, Arthur?” 

A thin cry echoed throughout the glass-fronted cabinets, and Arthur turned to one of the fading echoes, and began to thread the maze. As they walked, Prentiss’ appearance in the reflections began to shift, hair shortening and lightening, bones shrinking, until Valerie Jenkins marched with the extractors to save her sister.

\-----

The blackness had lasted longer the second time.

The shouts of anger and shattering wood had echoed in their ears as Reid had pushed the button to send the rest of them down into Limbo. Finding Valerie hadn’t been that hard, but pushing through Thomas’ projections with only four of them had been a closer thing that Cobb wanted to admit. Bad enough to know he had to go back into Limbo, once they’d realized Thomas had gotten to Valerie already. Twice as bad to get thrown into it unwittingly, if Thomas had managed to get to them. Reid had managed to get them to Valerie and Thomas in one piece, warping Thomas’ dream around him and quietly not giving a flying flip about how difficult it was.

Idly Cobb wondered how long it would take Eames to make the man a job offer when this was all over. Better to think that than to let fear take him when he dropped into the one place he had never wanted to see again. Hotchner had raised an eyebrow at his non-expression when they’d found Thomas, when it was clear they were going to have to follow him into deadly danger in order to possibly save at least one victim. Cobb had just stared back as he ran out the lines and positioned his needle.

“We have time,” Cobb said, dropping his gaze to concentrate on getting everything right. “We’ll have plenty of time down there.” Too much time, honestly. Every deeper level stretched out time, seconds could pass in the real world while hours or even weeks passed in the dream. That was how Thomas had managed to hurt his victims so badly in only a night. And in Limbo, it wouldn’t be hours, it could be years. Even decades.

Eames mercifully refrained from commenting as he and Hotchner prepared themselves, ignoring the sounds of impending violence as Reid stood by to guard them during their descent.

But the blackness had still lasted forever, as if Limbo was making certain Cobb remembered where he was going.

Cobb found himself on the shore, shoes wet but clothing dry. The remembering sense of loss, of mourning that he’d felt here the last time was far less. He could breathe easier, without the lurking sense that Mal would appear and try to drag him down into an ocean of guilt. It helped, in a perverse way, that the other victims had been in Limbo for so long. 

God only knew what they had thought him the remnants of his and Mal’s creation, but through experimentation or desperation, they had wrought their own changes on the face of Limbo. It no longer looked how he remembered it, and that helped dispel the old ghosts.

However, it did not fail to impress. The victims had a wide variety of interests, and it showed in rows of elegant skyscrapers, towering trees, magnificent ziggurats, and gothic mansions.

“Mr. Cobb?” Hotchner asked quietly. “Valerie grew up in a house similar to that. There was a family photo on her nightstand.” He gestured at the gothic manses, and Cobb shook his head and focused. Though different buildings held sway, Cobb realized the women hadn’t fundamentally changed the layout he and Mal had created years before. Streets and avenues still ran how he remembered them. If one house was there, a practice run, then the others would be…

“That way,” Cobb said.

“I think you’re quite mad,” Eames muttered. “Both of you.”

Hotchner didn’t deign to reply, and Eames subsided to talk directly to Cobb. 

“This has changed quite a bit,” he said.

“Just the buildings,” Cobb nodded, unsurprised. _He_ hadn’t talked about what had happened here, either years ago with Mal or more recently with Fisher. The only person he’d told the whole story to was Ariadne. He hadn’t wanted to tell Arthur, whom he had to work with, but Ariadne had been necessary and safe. 

Cobb hadn’t asked her not to speak to the others. He’d actually counted on her telling them eventually. They deserved to know, but he didn’t want to have to talk about it again. Once had been enough. So the only way Eames could have known what Limbo looked like was if Ariadne had built an approximation and shown them. He wondered when she’d done it. Sometime right after the Inception, or just before this job, perhaps? 

Did Hotchner already know? It was hard to know; the man had been a lawyer and was now an FBI agent – he’d made a career out of being absolutely unflappable. A con artist (Cobb would not give an extractor a prettier title) had to be able to take things in stride, but frankly the profilers were better at it in the real world. Most extractors fell into the job, drawn there by desperation or need, like him, or curiosity and wonder, like Ariadne or Yusef. Hotchner had chosen his job, and that gave him a stable base. Whatever else had happened to him in his career, he had that faint feeling of certainty, of right, that made a shield almost impossible to crack.

\--

Morgan could feel his hands starting to go numb with repeated firing, and he scanned the plaza for his quarry. A bare flicker of movement made him smile grimly, realizing the projections were starting to gang together. Thomas had gotten tired or frightened of having his projections shot down. Finally he was starting to realize he was no longer up against an unwitting victim, but an alert and wary adversary.

But no matter how tough Morgan thought he was, he couldn’t hold Thomas here forever. He’d realize something was up, and eventually his projections would try something that would overwhelm Morgan… or more. And if he started getting extra aggressive here, that would translate into the lower level. Could Reid hold Thomas off if things started to get worse? Yes. Not with Morgan’s firepower, but with his own mazes and traps. Morgan just needed to warn him. 

Something moved at the corner of Morgan’s eye, and he ducked below the window. If Thomas subconscious realized how dangerous Morgan was, he would probably redouble his efforts to kill not just him, but Reid, Hotch, and the extractors too. And if Thomas had been as cruel as they’d profiled, he probably already had Valerie on the lowest level, which mean Reid was defending three sleeping teammates on his own. 

Reid was on a low chair in the warehouse floor behind Morgan, and though he couldn’t be kicked out of his dream level, he would feel movement. The whole world would shift. Arthur had once demonstrated that graphically during their training and had left Morgan clutching at the floor, trying not to fall on the ceiling. Reid would remember that even better than him. Morgan took careful aim and then slid Reid’s chair across the floor violently. 

“He’s coming for you Reid,” Morgan muttered. “Watch out.”

\--

A level down, Reid barely hung on as the library slewed sideways, dumping books and tipping desks. The world stabilized, and Reid began to look around as his heart pounded in his ears, fear sickeningly real in this unreal place. Someone was coming, something was happening. Either Thomas had gotten through to Morgan, or Morgan was… trying to warn him. Bars slammed up from the floor to protect his charges, as he turned his attention to the projections invading his library.

\--

The tallest tower of the most elegant manse, that was where Valerie had gone to hide, seeking security in the place she’d known as a child. Which was exactly where Thomas had gone to find her, seeking out the one place where she should have been the safest and turning it against her.

“Eames, I hope you have someone she trusts lined up,” Cobb muttered, looking up at the attenuated house, hearing Valerie’s whimpers fall down the street below. Hotchner shot them a look as Eames looked to the window, letting his body shift, age, lighten, an older woman taking his place, her hair curled in an elegant style.

“Facebook photos on the trip from the hotel on our phones,” he explained shortly. “Your Garcia does a very quick electronic tango. It’s her mother.”

Hotchner just nodded shortly, drawing his gun and beginning the ascent up the stairs, a fast jog in time with Valerie’s fading cries.


	4. Chapter 4

Arthur flattened himself to a wall as movement reflected ahead. Prentiss and Ariadne followed suit, barely breathing as strangely hard-edged projections slid out between the cabinets. Appearing as sharply delineated men and women in lab coats, the projections looked oddly unreal. Prentiss tilted her head to get a better look at them, and stifled a gasp.

“They’re _glass_ ,” she whispered, blinking hard to make sure she wasn’t being fooled by the half-drunken feeling that still permeated her mind.

Arthur took another look, and stared up at the ceiling, clearly thinking furiously. “He’s been experimenting. Yusef said he was using a bad mix.”

“So he’s manipulating his projections to look like this?” Ariadne asked.

“To hurt Annette,” Prentiss said, shaking her head. “Anything he does will cause her pain now. He doesn’t have to be as skilled in torture as Thomas. This is his compensation.”

“Ok…” Ariadne took a few deep breaths to gather her courage. “Arthur,” she said very, very softly, “I’m really done with mixes we can’t be kicked out of.”

“Me too,” he whispered back. 

Prentiss looked at them oddly and gestured to her ear. “Do you hear that?”

Into the quiet of the lab, and the slight grinding of the moving, glass-edged projections, Arthur heard a woman scream.

“He hasn’t taken her down yet!”

“Go, go!” Prentiss began to jog through the corridors as fast as she dared, following the sounds of Annette’s voice. Projections began to converge on them, and Arthur brought his gun to bear on a few of the closest, shattering them with well-aimed rounds. Prentiss ducked under the spray of shards, and targeted a few of her own, scattering the path ahead with pebbles of glass.

Ariadne was less comfortable with firearms, and instead picked up a cricket bat from a forgotten corner. The first projection to cross within her reach shattered like a Ming vase. Arthur shot her a look of surprise.

“I don’t spend all my time studying !” she said a little breathlessly, and turned to bash another one. Prentiss kept in the lead, listening hard and watching for clues, trusting the extractors to help watch her back as they circled in on Annette.

\-----

The thin, creaky stairs to the exterior attic door let out onto a strangely huge ledge made of stone. Against the balustrade, Annette Jenkins cowered from Thomas. His fists were bloody, her clothes stained red. Hotchner brought his Glock up, trained on Thomas’ head without conscious thought. For a moment, they were not in a dream, just a rooftop standoff, something he’d done more than once in his career.

“William Thomas!” he called

Thomas’ head came up, and Valerie dared to look around him. Her eyes lit on Eames, still wearing the form of a curly-haired older woman, and she suddenly flung herself away from Thomas, running right for the forger. Thomas didn’t even visibly react, and Hotchner felt a sudden chill. He still believed he had the upper hand, even when his victim, the prized possession he’d spent endless time breaking, was able to leave his presence. 

“Tell me when,” Cobb murmured, sotto voce. Hotchner heard him, and flicked his eyes over the endless skyscrapers and wind-swept shores that had apparently once been Dominic Cobb’s personal domain. Unlike the above dreams, this place took more than simple sadistic desire to shape; Thomas had no advantage here.

“It’s over, Thomas,” Hotchner called, keeping his voice even. “You’re coming back with us.”

Thomas looked behind him and then turned back to the team, his smile tight but his eyes crazed. “How about you just leave instead?”

“There’s nowhere to go. You’re surrounded, you’re disarmed, and we cuffed you to the chair.”

Thomas considered that, and shook his head. “There’s more than one way out. As a matter of fact, there’s one out there. My body is disarmed.” His gaze slid to rest squarely on Valerie. “Hers isn’t.”

Hotchner’s aim didn’t waver.

“After the second level, they figured things out. But why didn’t they just kill themselves and wake up? They didn’t have to believe me about the compound. But they would believe me about the pressure sensitive bomb I put under them. They move, they die. Stay asleep, they live.”

Hotchner reviewed the crime scenes in his mind’s eye. If Thomas were telling the truth, he must have taken the bombs with them when he went. Bomb residue wasn’t something the labs had been testing for. But where would he have gotten one? Thomas didn’t have a background in explosives…

“Your chemist,” Hotchner said positively, knowing he was right.

“Very good.”

How did Thomas prevent accidents? Was he protected somehow? He hadn’t been wearing body armor or a helmet… 

It was his position, Hotchner realized. The long tubes from the PASIV, the fact that he had positioned his body near the door. If the blast had been small, he could escape major damage even if it exploded while he was in the same room, and his timer would be able to get him out of the dream safely enough, even if his chemist hadn’t shown up. And now the profilers were providing him with a human shield. Morgan had been on the bomb squad. Could he disarm it? 

But Morgan was on the uppermost level. If he left, everything below would collapse, possibly leaving all of them in Limbo for another decade or two before the other team could get back down here and save them. They could lose her, lose everyone here, even if they stopped Thomas. Unacceptable. How long until the mix was back to normal, until they could all leave together? Someone would have to stay with Valerie until the bomb was diffused. And did Thomas have any other tricks up his sleeve?

\-----

The chemist looked up wildly from where Annette cowered in a corner, his PASIV already open on a table beside a single chair.

 _A single_ , Arthur realized with relief. The chemist might be somewhat cracked, but he was smart enough to realize that Limbo was too dangerous to play with. He wasn’t going down there to continue his crimes like Thomas was; instead he was just using it to clean up. He was going to dump Annette down there like garbage.

Annette’s skin was marked with shallow cuts, presumably from tangles with the projections, and she cried out weakly as the chemist turned away from her, a long, thin blade in his hands. A deeper cut on her arm began to well up, the blood running down her elbow to splash on the floor. Arthur brought his gun into view, making the chemist’s breath catch, while Ariadne slammed her bat into a projection so she could shut and bar the door behind them.

“Who are you?!” he demanded.

“I came to take Annette home,” Prentiss said calmly, her voice high, like Valerie’s voice mail message.

“How did you-?”

“Shut up,” Arthur said shortly, twitching the barrel just enough to make the chemist freeze.

“Sis,” Prentiss coaxed, beckoning to Annette. “Come with me. Please, it’s ok.”

With a wrenching sob, Annette flung herself into her “sister’s” arms. 

\-----

Music echoed, faint in the vast streets, but still audible. Yusef had finished the mix. It was time.

“We’re leaving. Now,” Hotchner said. 

Cobb got it immediately, but Hotchner still staggered from the force when the skyscraper erupted under their feet, bearing them skyward. 

“Eames, get Valerie out of here and keep her with Reid.”

In his guise of Valerie’s mother, Eames nodded, and Cobb collapsed the ledge of the tower beneath them, dropping them down, kicking them out.

Thomas was shocked, gaping at Cobb and Hotchner as they advanced on him slowly.

“How did you…? You can’t…”

“I’ve lived a lifetime down here,” Cobb said steadily, the buildings around him surging and dancing, angry at Thomas for what he’d done. “This is no longer your game.”

A path opened up for Hotchner to rush Thomas off the edge, Cobb following him down, falling…

Hotchner opened his eyes in the library, feeling the adrenaline rush still, and pushed himself upright. Reid was there, though Eames, Valerie, and Thomas were gone. 

“Reid?”

Reid’s face was paper-pale under the library lights, looking like he’d been through several levels of hell already. “I already sent them up. Eames told me about the bomb. We have to keep Valerie under as long as possible so Morgan can disarm-.”

“I know, just get us up there, we’re going to have to hold Thomas back.”

Reid picked up something from the table, a simple triggering device, brother to any number of explosive detonators the team had dealt with over the past few years. The irony did not escape either of the profilers. A flick of the switch, and the library exploded around them.

\-----

“How long do we have?” Ariadne murmured.

Arthur checked his watch. “Ten minutes’ real time. Forty minutes here.” 

Ariadne firmed her grip on her bat, and resolved to take those shooting lessons Arthur kept insisting on. The chemist was starting to sweat.

“Who are you? How did you get here?” 

“FBI,” Arthur said shortly, answering for Prentiss. If she broke character, Annette might panic, and after all she’d been through, she did not deserve any pain at the hands of her rescuers. And if she did panic, the chemist might try something stupid, and Hotchner wanted him alive, not shot in the head and dropped into Limbo to rot. No matter how much he deserved it for his part in the attacks.

Besides, all they had to do was hold off the chemist’s projections for a little while longer, and they would be home free.

“How? How did-?”

Arthur fired a single shot right past the man’s head, close enough to rattle his skull. That was enough to shake him. 

“Don’t talk,” Arthur warned. If he heard any just of justification for what Thomas had been doing, for turning an extractor’s art into a weapon, his next bullet was going to end up somewhere less vital and a lot more painful.

“But Annette has-.”

Prentiss raised her own gun with one hand, the other protectively wrapped around Annette.

The chemist shut up, pale and shaking as Annette had been earlier. 

\-----

It was a wonder, Eames reflected, that he never seemed to feel quite as tired from one dream level to the next. It was as if his dream-body was actually getting rest. All to the better, because he figured he’d raced a good four miles of bookshelves down in Reid’s dream and another five in Limbo’s streets and was not looking forward for more.

When he looked up to see Morgan at the window, surrounded by a small pile of shell casings, he realized he wasn’t going to get any further rest.

“Where the hell have you been?” Morgan yelled, turning long enough to throw another M5 at Hotchner, who was just stirring next to him. Hotchner caught it smoothly and went to the other window, crouching low.

“Valerie has a bomb under her. We can’t leave yet,” he explained shortly.

“Shit,” Morgan said, popping up to fire off a few more shots at Thomas’ projections. Cobb and Eames had Thomas covered with their own weapons, while Reid was crouched near Valerie.

“You’re real?” Valerie whispered, the first words she’d managed to speak since Reid had seen her. From the way Hotchner, Cobb, and Eames snapped around to look at her, it might have been the first word she’d spoken in the whole extraction.

“Yes, Valerie, my name’s Dr. Spencer Reid, I’m a profiler with the FBI. We’re here to rescue you.” His voice was soft, gentle, providing a hard contrast with the violence around her. 

“How?”

“Mr. Cobb and Mr. Eames helped us enter your dreams so we could find you and get you away from Thomas. Valerie, he put a bomb under you, do you remember?”

“Thomas?” she asked. She turned to look at Thomas, and seemed to really see him for the first time. Sense flooded her eyes, along with an almost animalistic rage. She screamed as she stood up, and Reid felt a twist in his mind again. The world slammed, shifting.

Valerie has just taken control of her dream. Cobb and Eames moved back-to-back as the doors and windows shifted, a howling coming from outside as hundreds of projections, no longer respecting Morgan’s aim, began to converge.

“Valerie, stay asleep, stay asleep until we can disarm the bomb, please. We’ll take Thomas into custody, he won’t hurt you anymore. You’ll be safe,” Reid said, putting every ounce of sincerity into his voice that he could muster.

Hotchner and Morgan moved back towards the extractors and Thomas as the noise grew louder outside.

“Cobb, Eames, do you know anything about bombs?” Morgan asked tersely.

“Not my area,” Eames said tightly, as Cobb shook his head. 

“Get me out first,” Morgan said. “Give me as much time as you can.”

“It’s pressure-sensitive, small area,” Hotchner said, having to raise his voice as the howls of the crowd began to reverberate on the walls.

“Got it.”

Hotchner raised his gun and shot Morgan in the head as Valerie’s screams seemed to be ready to bring the walls down around them.

\-----

Yusef almost jumped out of his skin and Morgan started awake, and then all but leapt out of his chair.

“Call the bomb squad and an ambulance, now!” He rid himself of his needle and moved to Valerie, crouching down and pressing very lightly on the mattress to see under her.

“Agent Morgan, what’s going on?”

“Valerie has a bomb under her,” Morgan said flatly, not even looking up.

Yusef took two steps backward involuntarily before calling to the officer outside. Radios squawked as the frantic calls went out.

Morgan cursed softly about missing the possibility of such a trap as he examined the bomb. Thomas hadn’t had any kind of tools with him to tune the bomb, so his chemist must have them-. Morgan’s heart almost stopped. The chemist.

“Yusef, the other team!”

“They’re in the basement with Valerie’s sister-,” he started.

“Get down there, take over monitoring, and tell J.J. to get in there and keep everyone from waking up.” Yusef hesitated, not wanting to have to get close to yet _another_ bomb. Then he looked at Eames and Cobb, his resolve strengthening, and took off down the stairs at a run.

\-----

J.J. almost dropped her syringe as Yusef banged the door open, and she shot him an annoyed glare.

“Don’t _do_ that-.”

“There’s a bomb under Annette,” Yusef said shortly, and J.J. gaped at him for one stunned second. “We have to keep them asleep until the bomb squad comes.”

“Take over,” J.J. said shortly, and Yusef took the syringe with care. “I’ll go tell them.”

Yusef took a look at the remaining vials as J.J. laid herself out on the floor. She’d been mixing very slow, the only way she knew how; J.J. didn’t have Yusef’s experience to know how hard she could push an active dilution. Yusef kept the same pace, however. Right now, they _couldn’t_ afford to be able to let anyone out. Yusef prayed that Valerie’s group was able to hang on.

\--

Morgan could see the bomb wasn’t terribly sophisticated, a pressure switch that could be turned on and off with a pair of pliers for transport and placement. Not the acme of explosive devices, but effective. He breathed a small sigh of relief, and he shouted for the uniformed officer that had been guarding the perimeter.

“Officer! What’s our ETA on the bomb squad?”

“Twelve minutes, sir,” came the unwelcome response.

Morgan swore softly. Twelve minutes inside the dream… far too long to keep Valerie’s angry projections from slaughtering them all, not unless everyone inside there banded together to work against her. He sprinted downstairs for the garage, ignoring the stares of police, and he ransacked the tools until he found what he was looking for. Taking the stairs two at a time, he paused long enough to calm his breathing and steady his hands before kneeling at the bedside, putting two thin boards on the bedcover. 

If he was careful, he could possibly give himself enough room to work without blowing himself and Valerie both up. If he wasn’t, it was likely he wouldn’t have to worry about the consequences. Gingerly, he pressed on the bed again, and began to work.

\-----

Rossi flinched when the door erupted in a flurry of knocking. He’d just spent the last half-hour with his eye pressed to a slit in the wall, playing shooting gallery with the half-drugged projections; knocking (rather than pounding) was not what he was expecting.

“Dave, Dave, let me in. Now!” came a muffled voice.

He cracked the door with extreme wariness, and almost ventilated his visitor before he saw her face. “J.J.!” He slammed the door shut behind her and barred it before turning to say anything else.

“Stay asleep, Dave,” she warned, grabbing a line on Annette’s PASIV. Rossi opened his mouth to demand clarification, and J.J. said one word guaranteed to silence him. “Bomb.”

“Christ. Go!”

\--

J.J. opened her eyes to an endless laboratory, full of glass-fronted cabinets… and very shiny, pissed-off projections heading right for her.

Barely stopping herself from shouting in surprise, J.J. drew her gun and fired, glass shattering everywhere as the projection went down. Screeches like nails on a chalkboard sounded from every corner of the place. Swallowing hard, J.J. tried to find someplace defensible, some corner to stand in, as scraping footsteps began to shuffle towards her.

 _Shit,_ J.J. thought, looking around wildly for any hint of the rest of the team. Prentiss, Ariadne, anyone. _Shit!_ Her mind was full of the warnings Eames had given her about dying in a dream that you couldn’t wake up from: Limbo.

“You don’t want to die down there. There’s no guarantee you’d survive. You don’t want to go into Limbo if you can help it. Scratch that, don’t. Just don’t.”

“But we might have too. Cobb said that was where the victims were trapped.”

“Don’t volunteer, and don’t get killed. We’ve almost lost people that way.” After that, Eames had kept his mouth shut, as if he’d said too much.

J.J. raised her weapon, and she fired, fired, fired, the ground around her becoming heaped in glassy, sharp-edged pebbles, as she slowly backed away, heart in her throat. A darting glance down a side corridor showed more vitrified carnage. Taking a deep breath, J.J. followed the path of destruction, turning around every other step to shatter another translucent form.

\-----

Eames took his own earlier advice to Morgan, dropping his borrowed form to pick up a grenade launcher. Hotchner was mortally glad this was a dream, because the explosions from their detonations through the windows and doors would have deafened him permanently in real life. Flexing numb hands, he kept up his stream of bullets as Reid kept up his stream of words towards Valerie. 

Though he had the best shot of calming her, Hotchner needed Reid on the offensive, using his world-bending skill into trapping the projections so Hotchner and Eames could deal with them a few at a time, instead of in waves. They dared not trust Thomas, and that left Cobb to keep him from killing himself to try to gain freedom in the real world, or Valerie killing him for revenge, rather than being able to fight alongside them. Having another person on their side could make a major difference. Hotchner wanted to try to force a topography change himself, to give his people a better chance to hide, but that required concentration that would take his focus away from the threat at hand. In trying to save them, he could get them all killed. They needed their victim to just work _with_ them.

“Reid,” Hotchner said, just loud enough to be heard over the barrage. “We need her on our side.”

Reid heard him, and he took Valerie’s hands, distracting her from where she threw herself against a chain-link fence that Reid had barely managed to put together to keep her from getting at Thomas.

“Valerie, Thomas will be going away. We know what he did to you, and he will not escape justice for his crimes. Just let us take him away, let us bring him to pay for his crimes…” Reid kept up a steady patter of calming words, trying to answer that burning need for revenge that fueled Valerie’s rage. Bit by bit, the wild-animal fury was leaving her eyes, but by the unending roars of explosions and bullets, her projections weren’t in the least interested in settling down. Her mind had been invaded for too long.

\-----

Yusef was keeping the dilution as slow as he dared. Even though he knew that stopping might have kept them asleep for another few hours, trapped in the chemist’s own designer drug, the idea of leaving any of that cruel compound in his friends’ bodies frightened him almost as much as the unseen bomb under Annette. What was in their veins now was almost pure, but since he didn’t intend to give them any musical cues, they wouldn’t try to wake until-.

A radio alarm on Annette’s bedside suddenly blared into life, the cheerful, bouncy tune of a pop song flooding the ears of the sleepers. Blood draining from his face, Yusef lunged across the room to turn it off, but knew it was too late. Arthur had undoubtedly already heard it.

“Help!” Yusef yelled up the stairs. “I need help, please!” Torn between fear and friendship, Yusef picked up the needle with shaking hands and remained near the PASIV.

\-----

Arthur heard the music filter through the echoing corridors and felt a wave of relief. He’d been hearing gunfire outside the door, and had not been looking forward to dealing with armed projections. At least they’d be able to get out of this unscathed, though the same could not be said for poor Annette.

“That’s our cue,” he said, making mental note to tease J.J. about her choice in music when they got out of here. The chemist made to open his mouth again, but shut it with just a glare from all of them. 

“Ok, we’ll go first,” Prentiss said, bringing her gun into her lap. “This is a dream, Sis. We’ll just wake up, it’s ok…”

Annette nodded slowly, her eyes bloodshot, and let Prentiss put the gun to her forehead.

\--

J.J. saw the door at the end of the corridor, sturdy and solid, unlike the rest of this place.

“Prentiss! Arthur!” she called, turning on her heel to shoot another projection. “Open up!”

A bullet flew by her to smash a projection she hadn’t seen, and J.J. turned around to see Arthur standing in the doorway, a very confused expression on his face. J.J. ducked inside and shut and locked the door behind her.

“What the hell are you doing here? I just heard the cue-.”

“I didn’t cue anyone! Annette’s wired to explode, there’s a bomb under her,” J.J. said quickly, feeling herself shaking internally as she realized how close they’d come to destroying themselves.

The chemist exhaled explosively, as if in relief, and Ariadne raised her cricket bat. “You can still shut up,” she said warningly. He kept silent, his eyes closed.

“Yusef is manning the machine. That’s all I know,” J.J. said. “We just have to wait until the bomb squad frees Annette.”

Something crashed into the door behind her and J.J. jumped, bringing her gun to bear as more of those tooth-rattling screeches pierced the air.

\-----

Morgan worked his hand in between the boards holding the bomb steady from both the bed below and Valerie’s body above. The wire was in an awkward place, but there was just enough room to get the snips in there and cut it. Holding his breath, Morgan eased the tool into place and squeezed.

\-----

Eames shouted as a stray bullet winged him, knocking him to the floor. Hotchner kept picking his targets coolly, but the numbers simply weren’t adding up. A flash from an unexpected place, and he felt pain explode in his gut as the bullet went just under the lower edge of the vest. 

“Hotch!” Reid yelled, as the world went black around him, the projections pouring through every door and window. Before his eyes closed, Hotchner could see Valerie throwing herself through the battered fence towards Thomas, while Cobb backed away to give her a clear shot at the man who’d tortured her.

\-----

Reid snapped awake, heart pounding almost of his chest. As he sat up, he saw Morgan on the bed, holding Valerie Jenkins while she cried, the nasty little bomb on the floor beside his foot. Next to him, handcuffs rattled as Thomas struggled against his bonds, caught and helpless as his victim had been. Across the room, Hotchner was sitting up, waiting until Cobb had opened his eyes to give him a solemn nod. Eames was muttering something under his breath about dying spectacularly, but cut himself off to glare at Thomas briefly.

Hotchner got up slowly, removing the needle from his hand. He walked over to Thomas in silence, removing the man’s own needle and retracting the line. He then signaled to the police officer standing in the doorway, a very pale-faced man, wide-eyed at what he’d just seen.

“Officer, take William Thomas into custody.”

\-----

The bomb squad arrived as Thomas was being marched out, and Morgan insisted on going with them to help disarm Annette. A few tense moments later, a very grateful Yusef adjusted the timer on the PASIV, and the other team woke up.

Morgan let the paramedics take the shocky Annette upstairs to her sister, and then he returned to find Prentiss, J.J., and the extractors having a very strange conversation.

“-knee deep in glass shards. Seriously,” Prentiss was saying. “It was hard enough keeping Annette calm as it was!”

“Glass shards?” Rossi asked, shaking his head. “Glad that wasn’t on my level.”

“It was a good hit!” Ariadne insisted. “I didn’t miss any of them!”

“You’re getting shooting lessons,” Arthur said, working the kinks out of his hands.

“I know,” she said simply. 

Arthur seemed to stop short at her easy acquiescence, and then he smiled.

“Good work everyone.” Hotchner stood in the doorway, Reid, Cobb, and Eames just behind him. “Let’s go home.”

Arthur looked over Hotchner’s shoulder at Cobb, who gave him a quick nod and a smile. The job was done.

\-----

“I don’t suppose you’d ever consider…” Eames trailed off suggestively, and Reid shook his head.

“I think the FBI might frown on that,” he said with a tight smile, trying to hold back outright laughter.

“Give it up, Eames,” Prentiss said, holding out her hand to bid him farewell. “Not everyone’s that flexible.”

“I know a few people,” he said with an insouciant grin. Prentiss unsuccessfully tried to smother a smile.

“Thomas will be facing three murder charges,” Hotchner said to Cobb. “Plus one count of attempted murder and one accessory, not to mention any priors we can link him to. Ruiz, the chemist, is getting attempted and accessories for the victims. It’s enough felony charges to put them both away for life.”

“Best place for them,” Cobb said, a tightness around his mouth.

“Mr. Cobb, my team will be able to do all the testifying as to Thomas’ crimes. Your team will not even be mentioned by name. That was part of the conditions Chief Strauss had for them.”

Cobb relaxed minutely, and looked sideways at his team taking their leave of the profilers, swapping anecdotes and short stories of some of the higher points in their association. That was so rare after an extraction job. Usually you had to scatter immediately and pretend you didn’t know anyone. If you got together again, there was always that little voice that told you to look over your shoulder and make sure no one official was listening. This might be the only time his friends could have the relaxation he’d had for three years.

“I could speak to her about an extended contract,” Hotchner added, seemingly out of the blue.

Cobb looked at him sharply, and then smiled. “Maybe. I’ll have to talk to them.”

“I thought our teams worked well together. We couldn’t have done this without you.”

Hotchner held out his hand, and Cobb shook it firmly. Arthur appeared at Cobb’s elbow, suitcase slung over his shoulder, and took Hotchner’s hand himself.

“We’ll be seeing you,” he said shortly, and jerked his head towards the door. 

Cobb gave a scanty good-bye to the other profilers as the extractors filtered out, and finally left with them, undoubtedly intending to catch up before they scattered to the far corners of the globe.

Hotchner waited until their chatter had faded before opening his hand to reveal the small phone Arthur had slipped him during their handshake. A tiny sticky note was stuck to its screen: _If you need us._

Smiling, Hotchner slipped the phone back into his pocket before turning back to his teammates, knowing they’d all seen the same promise he had. Without a word, everyone sat down at their table, as J.J. began a new briefing.

\-----

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Saito,” Erin Strauss snapped, hoping her irritation was clear on the other end of the line. “I am not playing host to them again.”

“Do not be foolish. In order for Thomas’ conviction to stick, the rules must be tightened. My people could be in danger. Do you wish them to be dangerous on your side, or against your side?” he asked reasonably.

Strauss refrained from grinding her teeth as she poured over the paperwork on the desk. Her favors from the Justice Department had been dearly bought, and now it was time to pay. Saito was only stating the obvious.

“God help us from needing them again,” she said with ill grace.

“It is not gods they face, Erin,” he said. “Like your people, they would be fighting against nightmares.”

Sighing in inevitable defeat, Strauss began writing her new recommendations.


End file.
